


pour me a heavy dose of atmosphere

by myillusionsgone



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Gen, Identity Reveal, also:, angstreste, but also hugs and comfort, it's probably going to end up a more or less full (main) cast thing soooo, more angst than i expected or planned, that means: agreste angst., two years after season 1, which exists in abundance in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:32:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 39,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6548890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myillusionsgone/pseuds/myillusionsgone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there were too many secrets in this city, and sooner or later, someone would choke on them. — marinette, adrien.</p><p>Nearly three years after they first started to be Ladybug and Chat Noir, Marinette and Adrien find themselves with their backs to the wall. Or so it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. you gotta face up. — imagine dragons, i’m so sorry

**Author's Note:**

> insert shrug emoji here, please

 

Paris was so incredibly beautiful at night, and Marinette desperately wished that she could call it peaceful as well, but there was always something restless, uneasy in the night air. It did not matter, she reminded herself as she finally landed on a rooftop, following by Chat Noir. They had not talked much during their patrol as it had not been necessary. They had completed the run across town so many times in the past months, in the past _years_ that it came as natural as breathing to them.

Most nights, she looked forward to patrol, to running across Paris and feel the wind in her hair. It was the most relaxing time of the day for her, possibly only surpassed by the evening meditation Tikki had insisted on lately, and although she would probably never admit it, she enjoyed to spend this quiet and peaceful time with Chat Noir. He had been the one to suggest more patrols lately, something about wanting to make Paris safer before he went on a vacation in summer, and she had agreed, hoping that more sightings of the local heroes would make their enemy nervous enough to make a mistake.

(Frankly, Marinette was beyond done with Hawkmoth.)

Tonight, something was different about Chat. After all the time they had spent together, battling akuma and patrolling the city, she had become highly attuned to his moods, could read them just like he could read hers. It was difficult for her to ignore the nervousness that radiated from him, but she was not sure if she should ask. It could be in regards to something in his _real life,_ and they had agreed that they would not reveal their identities until they have dealt with their enemy.

“Did you ever consider that maybe, we should bring the fight to Hawkmoth?”

Marinette did not turn her head to look at her partner, rather staring at the Parisian skyline as it stretched on. She had thought about that, more than once, usually when she had patrolled on her own. It had always been annoying that the fight against the butterfly man had been this one-sided, that they had always been doomed to react to his attacks rather than to make moves of their own. By now, nearly three years after Stoneheart, it had grown more than just a little tiresome that the man’s modus operandi had not changed.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she admitted slowly as she wrapped her arms around her legs and looked at him. “But we got no clue who he is.”

It was why she had never brought it up — there were too many men in Paris and there was no real possibility for them to confirm whether or not someone was Hawkmoth. As much as she hated that it was like that, if they were to actually find Hawkmoth, it would be either a coincidence or a goldmine worth of luck. And she doubted that even  Ladybug would have that much luck.

“Well, my Lady, I got a suspicion,” Chat muttered as he pointed towards one of the buildings below. Her gaze followed his and all of a sudden, she felt as if her body had been hollowed out and filled with ice instead. Because he had pointed at a building she was familiar with: the headquarters of the Gabriel Brand. Of the enterprise that belonged to Gabriel Agreste, to the man who was the father of the boy who had been her first crush and who was now one of her closest friends.

“Someone who works for M Agreste?” she asked weakly as she looked back to him, praying that he did not mean what she feared he might. But she knew her partner better than that, better than he knew.

“No,” he said quietly, his fingers digging into her shoulder as he rested his hand on her back. “Agreste himself.”

Marinette felt something cold grasp her insides even tighter. “ _What?_ ” she whispered as she looked at him, wondering why this upset her — if it was the concern for her friend or the disappointment with her idol. Of course, she had known that Gabriel Agreste was hardly a warm human being, that he kept cancelling on his son, that he seemed to have great difficulties when it came to connecting to Adrien. But between being a _not so stellar_ parent and being someone who terrorised Paris was a difference.

“The guy’s … acting weirdly,” Chat muttered, and if she would not know so well that there was something more to it, something he could not say — probably because it was connected to the life she knew so little about — she would have shrugged it off, would have told him that someone who designed such great clothes could impossibly be evil. However, Chloé had an excellent fashion sense as well (as much as it hurt to say this) and she was not particularly nice.

“...tell me more,” she said softly, thanking the stars that Adrien was not going to be in class the next day because of a model thing because she was not sure how she would have faced her friend after listening to her partner telling him why he suspected that Gabriel Agreste might be Hawkmoth. And her partner lowered his head, nodding shortly before he told her more. As it turned out, Chat Noir had a few very compelling arguments that supported his theory, arguments that Marinette could not refute.

“Okay, alright,” she said as he ended, letting her hands rest on his shoulders for a moment, smiling thinly as he exhaled, relieved that she had not blown him off. But three years of working with Chat had taught her one thing: he had good instincts. And usually, looking whatever had unsettled him was a good idea.

“You believe me?” her partner asked flatly, the lack of the usual puns jarring. She did not point that out, it only fuelled her wish to investigate the situation. She trusted Chat blindly. He was the reason why she could be Ladybug, why they could win. She could not do any of this without him, that was for sure. And because of that, she would trust him and take his concern seriously, even though she _was_ worried about going after Adrien’s father.

“I do,” she said as she tried to smile again, still struggling to do so, before she cleared her throat to ask the one question that actually mattered. “What do you need me to do?”

* * *

“I thought you wanted to gather more evidence before telling Ladybug about your father,” Plagg stated the moment he left the ring, a frown on the small face. He did not sound happy, not that this was really new, but his Chosen had long learned to navigate the many moods of the kwami and to read between the lines.

Adrien groaned as he collapsed on his bed. He had been carrying the concern that his father might be Hawkmoth ever since Jackady, ever since Gabriel had shown interest in Ladybug’s earrings and Adrien’s ring — in the very Miraculouses Hawkmoth had been after since the beginning. And as weeks and months had passed, other details about his father’s life had started to bother Adrien. There was the suspicious way the man had often disappeared during Akuma attacks, the way he never seemed to have time for anything and how he had been missing more than usual since Jackady. And then, there had been the book. The final nail in the coffin, the nail that had led to nearly two years of investigation, investigation that had only caused more questions to pop up.

“I tried,” Adrien muttered as he covered his face with his hands.

And he truly had, but he had quickly realised that he had to be extremely careful or his father would catch on. That the disappearance of the book had remained without consequence had been a miracle — or it meant that Gabriel-should-he-be-Hawkmoth had decided that chasing Chat Noir was no longer necessary as the cat was trapped with the ring on a silver platter for him and rather focused his efforts on Ladybug.

That was what he was worried about, that his lack of caution could have gotten his lady into trouble. Because while Ladybug was intelligent and witty, she might possibly be too kind to keep up with someone as cunning and sharklike as his father. The last thing he wanted was his lady to end up in his father’s fangs.

“This has something to do with the room, doesn’t it?” Plagg asked, his usual sharp and stingy attitude absent for a moment.

He worried as well, Adrien knew this, but the kwami had been anything but forthcoming with information. All he had revealed was that the butterfly miraculous and its kwami, Nooroo, had been missing for _centuries_ and that the poor kwami (and the way Plagg had spoken of his … colleague? brother? had been unusually kind and sympathetic for the cat’s standards) had been used for terrible things more frequently than for what he was actually supposed to do: to enhance the good in others and allow them to rise above themselves, to shatter their limits.

The room. Adrien did not like to think about that.

Nearly two years ago, Adrien had thanked his lucky stars when he had realised that the disappearance of the book had gone unnoticed. Half a year after that, he had freaked out when he had realised that somehow, the book had found its way back although the guardian Ladybug had found in the meantime had assured him that _all was well_. And last month, he had felt something ominous when he had passed one of the doors that his father kept locked, that he was not supposed to open. It had felt familiar in a way, but it had also been something that had crept into his bones, making him shudder.

He had wanted to investigate, too focused on his hunt to find out whether or not his father was also his enemy to realise that the man in question had been close — and it had led to an ugly scene, one that had nearly gotten him grounded. In fact, it had gotten him grounded but when he had instantly pushed back — channeling a mixture of Chat Noir and being a teenager — his father had actually let him off the hook.

Not for the first time, which was another thing that had raised his suspicions.

It would be wrong to say that his father had suddenly become his best friend, but Gabriel had slowly backed away from his previous behaviour. It had started with small things after an argument, with letting Nino return to the mansion, with assigning the Gorilla to the new face of the brand. It had not seemed like much, but it had been **something**. Something that had been utterly out of character for the man Gabriel Agreste had become when his wife had disappeared.

“The room, yeah,” Adrien said with a grimace as he looked at the kwami. “I had to tell her.”

Secrets between Ladybug and him had never gotten them anywhere, they had always been stressful — because they needed to be able to trust each other for their stunts to work. Just like she had to rely on him covering for her while she used the Lucky Charm object of the week, he had to trust on her ability to see things through and fix everything, especially after he had been — indisposed. Not that this had happened lately as Hawkmoth was not the only one who had improved considerably. As far as he knew, with his belated decision to tell her about his worries, the only secret they kept was the identity secret. And that was a secret he could live with.

It did not seem like his kwami was going to argue with that — although he had suggested that maybe, Adrien should ask someone else for help rather than Ladybug, someone who was actually going to be around the designer without causing confusion, but Adrien had refused to even entertain the thought of getting a civilian involved. Even though the civilians he was thinking of — Alya, who had scored an internship at Le Monde for the summer, and Marinette who was going to work with his father during the same time — could probably handle the investigation without tipping anyone off because they were expected to keep their eyes open. But no, Adrien was not going to put them at risk.

“Just … if it turns out that it is your father terrorising Paris … what will you do then?” Plagg asked and Adrien stayed silent because he did not have an answer for this.


	2. i know what it means. —  james blunt, carry you home

Saturday afternoons were spent in the small coffee shop/tea salon Nino had found about a year ago when he had been hiding from an akuma and promptly declared to be their hangout spot because the cake was great (the shop owner ordered from the Dupain-Cheng bakery, after all) and the drinks were delicious. Adrien was not sure which akuma he could thank for this; it had been either the frustrated architecture student who had been akumatised after another had ruined her final presentation out of jealousy or the overworked father who had been fed up with the lies his co-workers told to get more time off while he was stuck working overtime — neither had been pleasant opponents.

By the time Adrien arrived this time, Alya was staring down at her laptop with a grim expression on her face as Nino ordered their drinks and food. A normal scene for his saturdays, especially with the way Marinette nearly sprinted across the room to help Nino with the drinks and the cake. In fact, Adrien could have sworn that the past five saturdays had followed exactly the same script — down to the drinks and the cake as they all had favourites by now and kept ordering them. Adrien smiled to himself as he approached their usual table. There was nothing like an afternoon with his friends to get his mind away from the  situation with his father, at least temporarily.

“Agreste,” Alya said solemnly as he sat down, her gaze never leaving the screen and her fingers never stopping their movement on the keys. “They left me alone with my essay.”

He rolled his eyes and chuckled before he leaned back against the wall, pulling Plagg out from his shirt pocket and chasing the kwami into his back. “Any chance you could have gotten this done earlier?” he asked with a grin, leaning towards the blogger.

She groaned and tried to kick him under the table, a pout growing on her face. “Tell that to Ladybug and Chat — I was _nearly_ done when they fought that … book-throwing akuma and I _had_ to go watch that fight,” she muttered as she pinched the bridge of her nose.

Adrien tsk-ed softly at the girl. Even before their former duos (Alya and Marinette, Nino and Adrien) had _merged,_ shortly after the DJ and the aspiring journalist had started to go out, he had often been concerned for her safety. She had been getting herself into the line of fire since the beginning, and that she had usually gotten away had often been a mixture of luck and Ladybug’s efforts to keep civilians safe. And while he understood that Alya felt like she had a duty to the countless people who followed her blog (being one of these himself), he was near painfully aware of how this reckless kept stressing Nino and Marinette. He had long lost count of how many times he had encountered one or the other, looking for Alya when he had just transformed back and had to regroup with all of  them.

“I think the risk that Marinette kills you one day because you worry her too much is much greater than an akuma killing you,” he said with a shrug, biting his tongue. He did not like the idea of his friend putting herself at risk either, but it was not his place to tell her to stop — at least not with the same, clear words as the others would. Instead, he merely implied how much it upset his best friend and hers, and hoped that she would understand him.

“I know,” she said quietly, finally slamming the enter key with a sense of finality that was strictly reserved for actually submitting things. “So, how’ve you been?”

Adrien chuckled before he handed her the laptop bag, raising his eyebrows at her. “Well, as I had my essay done already, I had no homework yesterday,” he shrugged, reaching for her notes and textbooks, neatly stacking them before he pushed them across the table, clearing it completely the moment Marinette put down the tray with the cake before she slid onto the bench next to him, barely suppressing a chuckle as she looked exasperatedly at Alya who was cleaning her glasses.

“Suppose you finished your essay last night because you totally didn’t cut and upload your interview with Ladybug and Chat Noir, hm?” the shorter girl grinned as she pushed the cakes across the table.

Once again, Adrien was _awed_ by how far they had come since they had first gotten to know each other. Marinette outgrown her clumsiness and her awkwardness in the more recent past, had grown more confident — perhaps because she had been elected to be the student president when they had gone to lycee, beating Chloe by a landslide. He had felt bad for his first friend for a few moments and had followed her (if only to be there to battle the akuma that usually happened shortly after Chloe was upset because of  something), but then he had noted how the blonde had seemed to relax when she had left the auditorium with her head held high, and there had been a  strong decrease in Chloe-related akumas lately. It seemed as if there was something that kept her from taking her anger out on others — and Adrien was happy to have witnessed this evolution. Which did not mean he wanted her back; that chapter of the past was closed for him.

“I didn’t upload _anything_ last night,” Alya said haughtily and held Marinette’s glance for a moment before she cracked, just as every other week as well. “Maybe I did upload it.”

“I cut it for her, however,” Nino said as he sat down, placing the drinks in front of their respective owners. “You won’t believe what Chat Noir did.”

Adrien smirked against his drink. He was pretty sure that while the others might in fact be stunned by his alter ego’s latest antics, he would only bask in their amusement. Ladybug had scolded him for his post-battle behaviour lately, but he knew that she did not actually mind his attempts on lightening the mood. After all, Paris and her citizens had been hostages of a man, no, a villain who might or might not be Gabriel Agreste  for years now and to give the city a reason or two to laugh seemed the right thing to do.

Of course, Adrien’s opinion on this might be slightly biased due to the name on top of his list of potential Hawkmoths, a list that had never contained more than this one name.

“I saw it,” Marinette said with a sigh, shaking her head ever so slowly. “I liked the idea.”

Green eyes widened for a moment.

Marinette rarely brought up Paris’ heroes, and if she did, it usually was when someone criticised Chat Noir and his Lady. Well, mostly Chat to be fair. For someone who preferred to stay out of these conversations, the young designer was often insightful in ways that surprised others as they had expected a lot from her, but no analysis as to why Chat Noir’s suit gave away that he was probably supposed to take heavy hits because he could surely handle more of it than Ladybug — an analysis that had made the actual Chat Noir gasp and nearly flinch when she added that she still wished that he was more careful as, according to her, she could impossibly imagine Ladybug without Chat.

“Since we’re on topic already, there’s something we wanted to run by you, if you don’t mind,” the blogger said cheerfully — all worries about the essay forgotten already — as she pulled the strawberry jam closer to her, a slight grin on her face.

“So we were making a … review video for the blog when something popped up,” Nino continued for her as she reached for her plate, stirring more sugar into his espresso before he took a sip, instantly grimacing — much to the amusement of his friends. They all knew that the DJ _loathed_ the taste of coffee and only drank it when he had either just finished an all nighter or planned one. In this case, Adrien guessed, the answer might be both. Nino had confided in him that he did not sleep as much as he wanted lately, simply because he did not find the time to rest between school, DJing at smaller clubs and preparing his portfolio for the music academy in Nancy.

(Some days, Adrien wondered if he should knock his friend out before he could work himself to death as the Nino he had met in collège — smart but not exactly diligent — had been replaced by someone who worked harder than many other people Adrien knew.)

“Yeah, remember the time I nearly got sacrificed?” Alya added, rolling her eyes at her boyfriend before she pushed more sugar and cream into her boyfriend’s direction. On the other side of the table, Marinette flinched and Adrien smiled sympathetically. Incidents when friends had gotten involved in akuma attacks were never pleasant to remember, he knew that far too well.

“How could I forget?” the other girl muttered with a grim expression on her face.

The blogger flinched at the expression on the other’s face but then, she turned her attention towards the folder she had pulled from her bag, paging through it as Nino’s fingers slowly approached the scone next to Alya’s cup — the cup that contained some mysterious mixture of chili, chocolate and coffee the aspiring journalist believed to be the best drink that had ever been created. Unsurprisingly, she had invented it and the barista who worked on Saturdays had humoured her.

On the other side of the table, Marinette’s eyes narrowed as she watched Nino’s quest on actually stealing the scone (an unspoken challenge that had been issued three saturdays before when Adrien had pulled it off), biting her lip as she reached for her own fork and nearly caused her drink (green tea with hibiscus) to fall over. This movement caused Alya to reach out quickly, stopping the drink from falling — and giving Nino the opening he had needed. With one swift movement, he snatched the scone away and took a bite, triumph-drunk laughter escaping him as he reached out to high five Marinette.

Adrien groaned for a moment, then he pouted. “Seriously?” he asked in mock seriousness as he looked at the giggling and whooping duo. “You had to team up?”

“C’mon, you cheated as well,” Nino grinned as he tore the scone into two pieces, handing one over to Marinette who smirked as well, a faint blush dusting over her cheeks. “You reminded her of her deadline.”

Adrien — could not deny this as he had planned his move on Alya’s scone carefully, but it did not keep him from pouting until Marinette reached over to him, seemingly aiming to pat his shoulder before her hand swooped down and grabbed the cookie next to his hot chocolate with a skill that would have warranted Chat-Noiresque reflexed to stop her.

“Nice,” his _supposedly_ best friend said, giving Marinette the thumbs up as she chewed the cookie with a far too smug expression on her face. Oh well, revenge would be Adrien’s and he knew exactly how to steal the marshmallow cupcake she would buy when they left.

“Children please,” the blogger said with a long-suffering sigh, making tsk-ing noises at her boyfriend and her best friend before she pushed her glasses up. “Okay so Alix’ brother was sorta — informative as an akuma, wasn’t he?” she stated as she reached for her drink, taking a sip as she gestured for Nino to continue as she enjoyed her drink and her food (or what was left from the latter).

Adrien’s memories in regards to Jalil Kubdel’s akumatisation had always focused on other things, mostly that he had been one of the stronger akumas — much like his younger sister who had become Chronogirl and his father who had been turned into an akuma with truly unpleasant time warping abilities seven months ago. But this did not mean that he had forgotten what he had learned about his partner that day, even though he had never brought it up again — identity talk was, after all, not part of the conversations. It had genuinely interested him, and he had wanted to learn more about all the things the age of Ladybug had implied (although he had quickly realised that _his lady_ was hardly the Ladybug in  the ancient scrolls). However, his investigations had been met with Plagg’s unique ability of boycott, and Adrien had decided to postpone all further investigations to _right after Hawkmoth’s_ _overdue_ _defeat_.

Only that it seemed as if Alya and Nino had set out to answer the questions similar to those that had occupied Adrien for so long now.

“Well, he did reveal that the legacy of Ladybug is _seriously old,_ ” the DJ said with a shrug that seemed to be casual but failed to match the glint of his eyes behind the glasses, something Adrien instantly picked up on — because he had seen that expression before, usually in the context of musicians and other idols. However, dating the admin of the ladyblog probably required some interest in Paris’ local heroes, and right now, Adrien could have kissed both his friends because _this was interesting_ , especially since Plagg was hardly forthcoming when it came to these things, pretending to fall asleep the moment Adrien asked or to lead the conversation astray until an akuma attacked.

“Ancient Egypt old, no?  I mean, she said that she was … what?  Five thousand years old, didn’t she?” Marinette asked flatly, her brows furrowing as she stirred more and more sugar into her tea. Enough sugar to make her grimace as she took a sip, so: too much sugar.

“That’s what she said, no?” Adrien frowned as he pulled the sugar out of his friend’s reach, closing his eyes and trying to remember the fight against Pharaon and what Ladybug had said afterwards. “I know I saw your vlog about that, Alya,” he added.

“Exactly,” Nino grinned while he stabbed his fork into his millefeuille, the same gleeful expression on his face that was usually reserved for rare records and especially good and cheap headphones. “And well, it’d be kinda weird for a single person to live that long, right? So we kinda thought … what if Ladybug is more a title, you know? Like, a mantle that’s passed down from one person to the next … a bit like … hm…” He trailed off, searching for an example for a moment before he looked up again.

Adrien was suddenly happy for the mediation strategies his fencing instructor had taught him before the last competition; otherwise, he would have done something to give away how close the DJ and the blogger had come to the truth. There had been many Chat Noirs and many Ladybugs over the course of the past centuries, fighting to protect humankind from the consequences of magic in the wrong hands — but that was all he knew about it.

“Batman’s Robin,” Alya suggested with a shrug before she continued, the grin on her face broadening. “And … once we went through the obscure depths of the internet, we found records of … people like the duo _all over the planet_ ,” she said, chewing on her lip as she paged through her folder until she found what seemed to be a list. “I only dug through the past century but — Chat Noir, Queen Bee, Lady Luck, Black Cat, Rotfuchs, Abeille … Félin Noir, Mr Luck and Ms Fortune, unnamed turtle themed person…” she went through the names, flinching once in awhile as she mentioned them and Adrien _knew._ Knew that Alya had dug up what Plagg had wanted to keep under the wraps so desperately: that Chat Noirs did not live long.

It was no surprise that inside his bag, Plagg was squirming and Adrien wished that Alya would change the topic, even though he knew that it was rare that the blogger stopped once she had gotten started on something, barely noticing that Adrien had flinched as well, colliding with Marinette who was squirming in her seat as well.

“The only names that haven’t changed in years are the turtle dude and Paupulo — the one with the kinda … Peacock themed design,” Nino shrugged as he turned the folder around so that Adrien and Marinette could look at it as well.

Only that Adrien did not want to look.

Because it felt too much like looking into a mirror that would tell him how much he had left to live, at a clock that told him when his luck would run out and an akuma would finish him off. But he knew what he would have to look and to tell Ladybug what he had learned — only that for the first time since he had started to suspect his father of being Hawkmoth, something weighed heavier on him than that, because some names came with pictures, mostly grained, some in black-and-white, and without taking a much closer look, he knew that the fallen Miraculous holders had usually died quite young.

“It’s…” he started, his voice shaky and flat.

“...like standing on an open grave,” Marinette added weakly, her face place as her trembling hand traced a line under _Rotfuchs —_ _†_ _4th of September 1994 (Berlin, Germany)_ , before she let her little finger rest on the masked face of the young man who was grinning dangerously foxlike into the camera. Then, she shuddered and closed the folder too fast, nearly crushing Adrien’s hand in it. “But,” she continued quickly, “I think you should tell Chat Noir and Ladybug about this. They should know — unless they already do.”

Next to her, the model cringed as he reached into his bag to pat Plagg’s head and to open the bag with emergency camembert, as he pondered upon the situation, finding that only one thing was certain: he did not want to sit through this conversation a second time as Chat, even though the mask would offer his thoughts some protection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> actually, Adrien, you don't know what this means. yet.


	3. we’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks. — bonnie tyler, total eclipse of the heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no excuses for the chapter title. i am sorry.

Transforming and to go to meet Chat for Sunday evening patrol felt like wading through icy water, only that this water was also sticky like honey — because Alya’s words were still echoing in Marinette’s ears and the names and the dates dancing in front of her, taunting her because her kwami had looked close to tears when Marinette had tried to ask Tikki about it, especially about how while Ms Fortune, a predecessor of her partner, had died, her partner Mr Luck had survived but also passed on his Miraculous. Deep down, she had known what that meant before she had even asked, but Tikki’s silence had confirmed it in a far more condemning way than she had expected it to.

Chat Noirs died. Ladybugs survived but died in other ways, ways that were a slow descent into the realms where their partners went first and a nameless agony caused by the nameless guilt of having failed their partner.

And Marinette was not sure how to tell her partner about that. Because no matter what she said, no matter how many times she rolled her eyes at Chat’s antics — she loved that cat, and she knew that if something would happen to him, something that could not be reversed by her, she would never be able to forgive herself for this.

A part of her could not believe that she had suited up saturday night after Alya had posted on the ladyblog that she wanted to see one of the heroes and that she had listened to the possibly worst lesson about a history that applied directly to her a second time, but she had known what she was signing up for while Chat would not have had this warning, _and_ she had been the one who had told Alya to inform the heroes, something that had probably been the most painful thing she had ever done in her double life. So she had recorded it for him and sent it to him with a warning, one that he had hopefully taken seriously.

With a last leap, she landed on the rather nondescript roof they were meeting on for their sunday patrols, and she exhaled, catching her breath. It was not like she was exhausted, she simply felt as it all other emotions had been drained from her. It was just like the cold rush of disappointment and resignation she had felt when Master Fu had told her, two years ago, that while there were more Miraculouses, there would be no backup for her and Chat Noir in their fight against Hawkmoth because either their powers would be a bad fit for their dynamic, they had been missing for centuries or it would be far too dangerous to bring them into the open. And then, there had been Wayzz’ whispered statement of how a kwami needed a Chosen and how some of the sleeping kwamis were picky when it came to the humans they gave their powers to.

Marinette was tired.

She realised the importance of her duty, of what she was doing for the sake of Paris (and probably the entire world), but she was aching for a break. She wanted to be able to go out with her friends without having to worry about sneaking away the moment an akuma attacked elsewhere. She wanted to plan her birthday without wondering whether she should send a formal request to Hawkmoth to please _chill_ for a weekend and let her enjoy her youth for once.

She loved being Ladybug and the rush of confidence it gave her, confidence that had been seeping into her life as Marinette just like the softness and compassion that was _hers alone_ had been influencing the way she acted when she was Ladybug, something Tikki had called absolutely normal. Apparently, there was always some exchange between the mask and the person who donned it, that in the optimal case, there was no difference between the both sides. But at the same time, shadows of fear were creeping up on her, wondering if she would be Ladybug for long enough to experience living on the middle ground, of being Ladybug without the mask and Marinette behind the mask.

Because like every other of Tikki’s Chosen before her, she knew that she would never be able to be Ladybug if her Chat was no longer around. The mere thought caused nausea to grow inside of her and anxiety to take a hold on her insides. She could not … she would not...

“So,” Chat muttered weakly as he appeared from the shadows, too pale for her tastes. “I … watched the video.”

She flinched for a moment because she had not heard his approach, and then, she grimaced to her endless mortification, turning away from him and towards the city they had dedicated themselves to. “I had figured there was a price for all of this,” she whispered, trying to keep the pain and the heartbreak out of it because he was not dead yet and if she would get any say in the matter, he would not die either. “I just didn’t think—”

“—it would be this high,” he finished the sentence with a mirthless chuckle, sitting down on the staircase behind her.

She nodded, but it was not really true. She had always been painfully aware of the risk for their lives, but she never thought about it because of the way these things worked. The moment she allowed herself to contemplate in just how many ways she could bite the dust, she would set herself up for just that.

As for Chat — god, she had been terrified for his sake so many times. Each time he had taken a hit for her, she had been scared that maybe, this time the Cure would not bring him back. So far, this concern had never come true but she dreaded the moment when it would happen, when she would let him down.

After a moment of focusing on the way her blood rushed in her ears and the sound of her own breathing, she turned towards him, reaching for his shoulders and squeezing them tightly before she spoke, every ounce of confidence she could muster wrapped into her voice. “We aren’t gonna die,” she said, praying that fate would not make a liar out of her.

Beneath her grip, Chat Noir seemed to tense for a moment before he smiled softly, lifting her right hand from his shoulder and kissing her knuckles the way he used to so frequently before he had stopped a few months ago.

Inside her chest, something soared again for the first time in many months.

When she was Marinette, Alya was her best friend, but when she was Ladybug, her best friend was Chat Noir and she would have been a terrible friend not to notice how his puns and flirtatious remarks had vanished in the past. She had attributed it mostly to stress about Hawkmoth — no matter how stable someone was, after three years of fighting the same opponent who kept hiding in the shadows, everyone was entitled to wearing thin.

“Well, LB, if you say so, I won’t let you down,” he said as he rose to his feet, bowing with great flourish, something that stung for a reason she took a moment to pinpoint. She had missed this, she realised. She had missed all the little things that made him _her_ Chat Noir, the way he acted when he was letting go and was just himself. And, far too late, she realised that she had completely _hated_ the way he had seemed to force himself to act the way he always had for months now.

She had always liked him most when he was just himself, when he did not pretend. And watching Chat Noir pretend to be Chat Noir — that was torture for her.

Rather than to reply, she pulled on his arm until he staggered against her. “Don’t worry about me, Chat, I’m fine,” she sighed while she wrapped her arms around him for a moment, trying not to cry — she was someone who cried when she was stressed and right now, she was stressed more than ever before — as she wondered if he did not realise that the only one who was truly in a position to let the other down was her, that no matter how he would fail her, he could _never_ fail her the way she could let him down.

For a moment, her partner was tense but then, he patted her shoulder gently, careful not to underestimate his enhanced strength and hurt her. “If you cry on my suit, Plagg’s gonna hunt you down and give you the lecture of a lifetime,” he said hoarsely, his clawed fingers pressing against her shoulders.

“‘m not crying,” she muttered, even though she was fighting a losing battle by the time she felt something like raindrops touch her hair.

“Ladybug?” Chat asked softly and she bit down on her lip, trying to blink away the tears.

This was not fair on him, she knew that. One of them had to be strong, even now, but rather than to patrol the city, it seemed like they were falling apart in sync. Coincidentally, she had wanted to do just that from the moment Alya and Nino had brought up the topic of how dangerous the life as a hero was, but she had thought that she could avoid this until she was somewhere where no one would see it. She had never planned to cry alongside Chat Noir on a chilly roof as the sun was setting.

“I don’t think we should patrol today,” she whispered as she listened to his heartbeat — just when had he grown so tall that her ear rested against his chest? — and tried to commit this sound to her memory as one of the most precious on her life, just like the bell at the bakery and the harmony of her parents’ voices when they sung old chansons and Tikki’s humming during nights when sleep did not come easy and Alya’s words of encouragement and Adrien’s laughter and Nino’s chortling noises when something was just _too funny_ — sounds that she could pick out of any mess of noises, sounds that were an integral, precious part of her life.

A year ago, she realised, Chat Noir would have grinned and asked if she did not want to let him go too soon. Today, he stayed quiet and just nodded as more rain fell onto her hair.

In the back of her mind, she knew that if a civilian would see them, they would get the wrong idea, but she could not bring herself to care about this right now. If the way she was feeling was anything to go by, her partner had to be feeling just as tired and anxious about everything as she was. And they were the only other person who could hope to relate to the emotions that were boiling inside of them.

* * *

Plagg was, as expected, the candidate for the title _Least And Most Amused Kwami_ everyone would be betting their money on. The moment he had gotten his hands on some camembert (which had been approximately half a second after Adrien had dropped the transformation), he had hugged it tightly and started to sway across the room, his voice an insultingly good imitation of Adrien’s own. _“If you cry on my suit, Plagg’s gonna hunt you down and give you the lecture of a lifetime,”_ he near-screeched as he hugged the camembert even tighter, causing the somewhat belated realisation that for this little act, he had cast camembert for the role of Ladybug. “God, kid, I get that you’re stressed out but — you got blood on that suit before … and she was there for that.”

Adrien grimaced as he closed the window, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, I just to … ease the tension…” he muttered as he avoided to look directly at the kwami, guilt dwelling inside his heart because it had not been fair on Plagg. “Or stop her from crying but … you saw how that worked.”

It had not worked.

Ladybug had cried, just like he had. And to cry had felt freeing because he had been holding onto too many emotions and negative thoughts that had clogged up his systems; crying had washed them out and he was feeling better, even though the negative thoughts would surely return before long, because their source had not yet eliminated, but perhaps he would be better at controlling them now as they would not be able to catch him off guard.

“You are stressed, she’s stressed, Tikki and I are stressed — we’re all on our last legs here,” the kwami continued, the bite disappearing from his voice as he spoke. The admittance of how stressed they all were was not surprising, given that Adrien had noted that Ladybug’s face had become haggard over the past months, but it surprised him that Plagg was the one who said it out loud. Or then, maybe it should not be too surprising — he had noticed that the kwami’s stomach was not the only thing about him that had unexpected depths.

“The thing is — and I’m saying this because Tikki never would: the closer Hawkmoth gets to our Miraculouses, the closer we get to his and Nooroo,” the cat continued with a sneer at the mention of their enemy before he devoured the camembert. “That’s what balance is all about,” he added thoughtfully, as if the idea had just struck him.

“You worry about Nooroo,” Adrien said softly as he opened the mini fridge he kept in his bedroom, throwing the kwami another wedge of cheese because Plagg was right; they were exhausted and nearly running on fumes at this point. Being Chat Noir had stopped being liberating the moment his father’s shadow had started to loom in this life as well, looking more and more like Hawkmoth’s at this point.

But there was more in Plagg’s words than just his lack of snide that made Adrien look at the kwami with surprise in his eyes. He understood worry and concern for friends, had often wondered how much of a miracle it had been that Marinette had never fallen victim to an akuma, even though she must have felt the troubled emotion the man exploited. For his partner, things must have been much worse; each time they fought an akuma, they fought evidence that someone he cared about was not free to make own decisions.

“He’s … a lot like Tikki, a gentle soul,” Plagg said grimly as he floated towards the bookshelf where he sat down, looking down at the cheese with a pensive expression on his face. “I don’t wanna know what centuries of being used _like that_ did to him. He’s … my opposite, if you’d like, but — we both like to choose underdogs. Like in that movie the blogger made you watch, I guess,” he added before he took a bite from the cheese, chewing it carefully before he continued to speak. “People who don’t know power value it more than those who’re used to it.”

Adrien understood what he meant and nodded slowly, although his thoughts instantly moved towards the akuma victims among his former classmates — more specifically towards Juleka, one of the kindest people he had ever encountered. Even when she had been akumatised, her powers had been harmless if troublesome in comparison to what others had been able to do when they had been taken over by Hawkmoth. It had been Ladybug who had pointed this out, that Reflekta had not really hurt anyone. Then and now, Adrien wondered if that had been because it was against Juleka’s personality to harm another person, because that would make a lot of sense to him.

“I wouldn’t want to see a bully with Chat Noir’s destructive powers,” he muttered as he shuddered, trying to push away the memory of the time when he had been hit by Dark Cupid’s arrow as it had hardly been his best performance, even though everything had turned out to be just fine. “Hey … do you think Ladybug’s gonna be fine?” he asked as he reached for a water bottle and sat down on his bed.

“Pretty sure she’s gonna be alright … she looked less stressed when you parted, no?” Plagg replied with a yawn as he curled up next to Adrien’s pillow, closing his eyes slowly. “And well, yeah, she’ll be fine. It takes more than that to get a Ladybug out of the air.”

And although he did not say it, Adrien had the feeling that he meant by ‘more than that’ that as long as Chat Noir was there, Ladybug would be alright. Talk about no pressure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear that it's going to get better and i promise this chapter was more of a filler to further establish emotional situations.


	4. hope when you take the jump, you don’t fear the fall. — onerepublic, i lived

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chloe's butler is very important to me, okay. Chloe's potential development is also very important to me. also: why did i think writing an akuma battle was a good idea?

Marinette was surprised when she arrived at the Hotel de Paris, and Chat Noir was already at the scene, talking to a frazzled looking Chloe who had a nasty gash on her cheek from, as it turned out, having a flowerpot thrown at her by the akuma after she had thrown her shoes at him in an attempt to distract the akuma, a disappointed politician, when he had attempted to harm her butler.

Akuma attacks at the hotel were nothing out of the usual; in fact, at this point, Marinette could probably sketch a perfect plan of the building from memory because they had been there so many times. What had been a more recent development, however, was that the akuma were not chasing after the mayor’s daughter because she had caused them, because lately, there had been an increase of akuma that had been after the mayor himself or one of the man’s guests.

“Didn’t think I’d see the day when Chloe put herself at risk for someone else,” Marinette muttered under her breath as she followed her partner towards the stairs, remembering the days when most akuma possessions had been because of the blonde and her moods.

“She has changed, I think,” the other said with a shrug, speaking her thought out loud, as he looked around, carefully opening a door and advancing quickly when the air was clear. “I got the room number of the akuma victim, by the way,” he added drily, pointing at a door.

“I’d like to send flowers to the person who caused that change,” she said calmly as she crouched down, pressing her ear against the door for a moment before she jumped up and nodded, just when Chat pushed open the door, rolling into the empty room and scanning it quickly, while she followed him quickly. “With the way it was going two years ago, I could’ve sworn that Hawkmoth was sending her gift cards because she was probably the employee of the month … without even being on the payroll,” she sighed as she strolled over to the desk, trying to get a feeling for the person who had been taken over because this would help to find the possessed item and wrap this up.

“Detective work?” Chat asked as he stopped behind her, her shoulder connecting with his chest as she went through the contents of the desk, trying her best not to discover anything that was too private. She was Ladybug which entitled her to certain privileges, yes, but she was also Marinette Dupain-Cheng and her parents had raised her to be mindful when it came to other people’s private lives.

“Don’t you know it?” she sighed as she paged absentmindedly through the crumpled gossip magazine, whistling softly before she threw the magazine into her partner’s direction.

Catching it and scanning the page, he whistled as well and nodded. “I think we know what pushed him over the edge,” he said as he returned the magazine to the desk and followed as she returned to the empty hallways of the hotel, looking back over her shoulder once or twice. They had not brought up the crying. She had wanted to, if only to make sure that he was doing better, but she had not known what to say. She wanted to make sure that he was happy, but as long as she did not know what made him sad, she could not help.

“Secrets splashed out like that have to make someone feel awful,” she agreed as they snuck through the hallways, making use of their experience when it came to navigating the building. She respected secrets, no matter who their owner was, which was only natural due to the secret she kept.

“Secrets in general only breed misery,” he countered with a shrug, twirling his staff in his hand as they ran, unsure of where to go — which did not matter to begin with. Sooner or later, the akuma always came to them because they were their target. “That’s why this one—”

“Uh-oh,” she muttered as a crowd of people appeared behind them, closing in quickly. She grimaced, even though she had seen something like this coming. As far as she could tell, the abilities of the akuma were on the level they had gotten used to by now because they had fought many of similar strength, but each akuma brought new challenges and they had to stay careful or there would be a high price to pay.

“Don’t you just hate it when they have minions?” Chat groaned in frustration as he grabbed her arm and pulled her through the door, using his staff to trip the first of the crowd before he closed the door and locked it. 

“Well, akumatised politicians always have them,” she sighed before she hurried down the hallway, heading towards the next level of the building, pulling him along. There were areas in the hotel that were better suited for fights against akuma than others, and by now, they knew exactly where to confront the akuma.

“Politicians in general do,” he retorted, slipping back into their usual banter which she had missed more than she had realised when it had disappeared, and she grinned before she stopped, frowning at the door. “As I was saying — this akuma apparently takes control of people when he hears their secrets.”

“I guess we should keep our mouths shut then,” she said as she pressed her lips together.

He smirked as he lifted his forefinger to his lips before he reached for her wrist and pulled her along. She followed quickly, dodging more minions as her partner made a path for them. It was often like that, she realised, that Chat Noir went ahead and cleared the path for the both of them. And probably, it was supposed to be like that, too. Because Chat Noir was the better fighter, was stronger and faster than her.

“Never thought I’d see the day when I would like for you to talk more,” she muttered under her breath, the unusual silence causing cold shivers to run down her spine as this was near  _ unnatural  _ for their standards. She wanted to say more, to shatter the silence that surrounded them, but before she could, they were met with a new obstacle: a door that had not only been locked (that would be no issue as Chat had gotten a master key card from somewhere, probably Chloe) but also been blocked from the inside.

“Well, LB, let me do the honours,” he said with an ironic bow before he summoned his cataclysm and freed their path, making a face when they were instantly approached by more people that were now controlled by the secrets they had kept for too long. “Great,” he muttered as he stepped backwards, extending his weapon. “Summon your Lucky Charm and let’s wrap it up quickly, yes?” he suggested before he charged.

“Good idea,” she said, watching his fight and trying to understand as much of the situation as possible to work out the fastest way of solving this — with a roll of duct tape which was the Lucky Charm this time. If it would change anything, she would ask Tikki for better objects but her kwami had no influence on what she received. Well, at least this one was useful because she would be able to keep the man from casting more Truth Rays and more other Truth things she did not want to encounter anytime soon while she went for the—

“Tie pin,” she muttered, spotting the key symbol on the object in question, the same symbol she had seen in the magazine. “Chat, I figured out the object so let’s go.”

“Alright, just let me get tha—” her partner was cut off the moment he turned, only to be hit by a falling chandelier and pushed into the line of a Truth Ray by a minion. “I love—” Chat Noir started slowly, his gaze pained as the words were forced out of him, and Marinette winced. He did not want anyone to know about this, and yet it was what the akuma was trying to make him say. 

Instantly, she shattered her original plan and backflipped quickly, toppling her partner over as she collided with him. Then, she threw him an apologetic smile because  _ that Lucky Charm required unorthodox plans  _ before she taped his mouth shut, keeping his secret safe for him. For a moment, she wondered what exactly his darkest secret was, but it was certainly connected to his  _ real life  _ and she would never ask about it in any case. The best idea would be if she just forgot about this altogether.

Next to her, his shoulders lost near instantly tension as he got back to his feet, charging at the akuma alongside her and for a moment, it felt like always. It felt like nothing had ever worn them down. It meant they were in perfect sync — and that was always their biggest advantage over akuma: they fell into an easy rhythm. They twisted and turned around each other, but they always knew what the other would do next. 

When she somersaulted, he used his weapon to bat the next Truth Ray out of his way, and as he kicked the opponent’s foot away, causing the akuma to lose his balance, she pulled the tie pin towards herself with a yank — it was fast, it demonstrated how easy cooperation came to them, even when one of them was not able to talk. She grinned as the pin dug into her palm and landed safely on her feet, much like Chat on the other side of the room. Then — cats always landed on their feet, did they not?

“You okay, Chat?” she asked with a vague smirk, only to receive a muffled answer as she set out to wrap this battle up. 

Catching the tainted butterflies was merely muscle memories at this point, but she stayed tense until the yoyo opened again and the white butterfly danced away, out of the window and into the Parisian evening. Getting up, she threw the Lucky Charm into the air, called the usual phrase and watched how the cure washed over the room and the rest of the hotel, cleansing the damage that had been done and removing the tape from her partner’s mouth.

“Nice going on that Lucky Charm,” Chat said as he rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “And, uh, thanks. Bien joué?”

Marinette grinned at her partner in hopes of cheering him up, their fists touching just when her Miraculous beeped for the fourth time and he gestured for her to get away, something she did with a grateful smile and a quick dash. She narrowly avoided Alya and Chloe — one interested in an interview, the other trying to just chat with her — and pushed open a door, leaning against a wall for a moment. God, it was true what everyone said; the akuma had been getting stronger and smarter as time had passed and Hawkmoth had learned more about his abilities and how to employ them properly. 

If he had known this three years ago, he would have gotten the earrings and the ring right away, but this way, both sides had been able to learn and to improve.

Groaning, she pushed herself away from the wall and stretched before she exhaled. “Okay, Tikki, spo—”

The door was thrown open again as someone stormed into the room. Chat Noir, to be precise. She would recognise that footfall everywhere, and so she twirled around, trying to tell him to get back out, but it was too late as her gasp went unheard when his ring and her earrings beeped for the fifth, final time in the same moment and gleaming light filled the small room as two exhausted kwamis were released from the Miraculouses. The light was too bright and yet not bright enough. It was too bright to be anything but the flash that occurred when a transformation was dropped and it made her eyes hurt, but it was not bright enough to actually blind them, to obscure their identity.

Marinette was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry.

Three years. 

Three years of immense caution, of hasty escapes before the fifth  _ beep  _ would have revealed her identity to her partner. Three years of close and closer calls.  _ Two years  _ of wondering if it was really worth it to run and hide each time she had to drop the transformation, usually to let Tikki recharge. Two years of wondering if maybe, she should let her partner in on the secret, even at the risk that she would not live up to his expectations. 

Because in the end, Chat Noir was her partner. Because Chat Noir could not be possessed by akuma, perks of having a Miraculous. Because Chat Noir would understand her struggles with having to hide her identity and her double life. Because Chat Noir was the only person (aside from Master Fu) her identity would be safe with.

Three years — and now, it had all come crashing down.

It was  _ so stupid _ . Whenever she had thought about revealing that behind the mask of Ladybug, she was Marinette Dupain-Cheng, a girl like so many others, she had expected it to be different. More dramatic. She had dreamed about it, in fact, and some of these scenarios had been nightmares. One of them dying, whispering their name, their true name with their last breath. Or, much brighter, finally dropping the mask because Hawkmoth had just been defeated and secrecy was no longer necessary. She had not expected that it would happen simply because they would pick the same place to de-transform because usually, they were far more careful than that.

She had never been able to imagine her partner’s face, and she had never really thought about this particular detail but as she was learning now, she would not have needed to rely on her imagination, because as it turned out, she knew her partner’s face very well.

Marinette was not sure if she could breathe. 

She was inhaling, sure, but it did not seem like any air was reaching her lungs. She was staring, motionless, at the boy who had replaced Chat Noir, at the boy she was crushing on. She had never thought that this was possible, had laughed off the idea that  _ Adrien Agreste, supermodel  _ could also be  _ Chat Noir, superhero  _ when Alya had made the suggestion.

“Cha— Adri— Chadrien,” she started, stumbling over her words. “I—” 

To his credit, he looked just as surprised as she was feeling. He had not pieced the picture together until right now either, she realised. He had overlooked the evidence just like she had, perhaps because he had not  _ really  _ wanted to know either. Because that had been the thing, for her. She had never really wanted to think about what her partner was doing when he was not being Chat Noir.

She had not wanted to go down the path where she would have wondered if her partner was stuck in class like her, what he was eating for lunch, whether he liked his classmates, whether he was sleeping as badly as she was — because she had been right to believe that her life as Marinette and her life as Ladybug had to stay separated.

Only that it now seemed like this had never truly been the case.

“La— Mari— uh,” the model replied, tripping over his words just like she often would in the past.

“So-sorry,” she stuttered as she looked down at Tikki who was resting in her arms, tired and in need of cookies. If she could transform, she would and make sure to get away as fast as possible to avoid this conversation for at least a week. She needed to somehow wrap her head around the idea that her friend and her partner were the same person. “I — it’s gonna take some time to get used to this,” she added as she looked back at him.

_ Some time  _ was most certainly not completely true. She would need more than that to figure out where her partner ended and where her friend began. And she had to somehow tackle the thought that, unbidden, crashed through all others and forced her to remember that if Chat Noir had suspected Gabriel Agreste of being Hawkmoth, Adrien had done the same thing. No wonder that he had looked so anxious when he had mentioned his theory — he had been accusing his own father of being the one who had caused so much pain for them.

And she when she looked at him, she knew that he knew that she was thinking about this because Chat, no,  _ Adrien  _ took a step into her direction and raised his hands before he froze and lowered his head. “The thing we talked about,” he started awkwardly before he cleared his throat and squared his shoulder. “That’s still a concern.”

“I-I haven’t forgotten,” she said quickly, but it was no lie. 

She had tried to push the thought out of her head, had not wanted to think about it too much — because it had made sense. But even though she had acknowledged that, she had not wanted it to be true even though it would have been their first solid lead on their hunt for Hawkmoth. Because she was friends with Adrien and she had not wanted to go after his father and possibly take away someone the other loved.

“Could you…?” he trailed off, and she knew what he wanted to ask her to do, because while she was just friends with Adrien, she was  _ best friends  _ with Chat Noir and this meant that half-sentences were a way to communicate they had mastered  _ years ago _ . She knew. With Chat Noir, she nearly always did, even now. She had gotten an internship at his father’s enterprise, the last school-mandated internship before they would graduate from lycee, and she had already planned to use the opportunity to keep a close eye on her idol, in hopes to find the evidence she needed to clean his name.

“I will,” she said slowly as she tried to force a smile, something that had never felt as difficult as it was right now. “But, uh, could we maybe … take a break?” she asked, biting her lip the moment she felt how the fake smile dropped from her face. “And just meet when there’s an attack?”

His face darkened instantly, mirroring his disappointment, and as she thanked her lucky stars that she had not found out that Adrien was Chat Noir when she had been in college, she reminded herself that they were friends now, with and without the masks. And friends talked about things that occupied their minds, cleared up misunderstandings.

“I’m —  _ happy  _ that it’s you, Adrien, there’s probably no one else I would’ve wanted it to be more because you’re so...” she said, trailing off as she ran a hand through her loose hair, wishing that she could be more confident, more  _ Ladybug  _ right now, because that would make it easier to find the right words. “It’s just — Chronogirl … and Volpina.”

She had had nightmares of watching Chat Noir die, again and again. And after Alya and Nino had shown her their research, she had not only dreamed of  _ her  _ Chat but of his predecessors as well. And she had had nightmares of the illusion of Adrien that Volpina had threatened to send falling into his death being real. The idea that they had been the same all along and that all her recent nightmares had been about the same person made her head hurt and caused her heart to ache. 

“God, I — I,” she interrupted herself before she exhaled, wondering just how badly she had messed up now. “Listen … Chat Noir risking his life was bad enough. Adrien also risking his life…” she trailed off, figuring that there were no words to properly express how this made her feel, even though she could not stop herself from whispering softly as she reached out, only to drop her hand before it reached him. “I would’ve given up my earrings for you,” she finally managed to choke out as Tikki squirmed in her grasp, too tired or too shocked to talk. “For both yous.”

“You know,” he said as his brows knitted together, “I’d do the same.”

“Three days,” she said quietly, as she watched how he looked down at his exhausted kwami, a kwami that had probably tried to keep up the transformation past its expiration date because Chat, because Adrien had used Cataclysm before she had summoned the Lucky Charm of the day. All of them were tired right now, none of them could handle this conversation right now. “That’s all I ask for … just let’s take some time to get our thoughts into order,” she whispered as she reached into her bag, finding two last cookies. “Um, I know he prefers cheese but … I don’t have a cheese bread with me right now...”

Adrien’s head shot up as he took the cookie from her, his face still much paler than usually. “You aren’t gonna ask?” he inquired as his kwami took a bite from the cookie, shuddering as it was probably worlds away from what he usually ate.

“I think that if I needed to know about it, you’d tell me,” she said slowly, creating pauses between her words that were filled by the sound of cookies being eaten. “And you shouldn’t feel … obligated to bare your soul.”

She had a vague idea what his secrets could be, especially with the way he was looking so vulnerable right now, but she was not going to pry, because even though she knew that the full impact of this reveal was yet to hit her, he was her friend. And even if he was not, she knew better than to take advantage of someone’s emotionally compromised state.

He nodded slowly, turning away after he let Plagg rest in his shirt pocket. “Could you … just text me when you get home? So I know you’re fine?” he asked softly, and she remembered that Adrien had never had any friends but Chloe for years, that he had only learned about actual friendship when he had started to go to public school, when he had met Nino.

“Of course,” she said as she tried to smile. “You do the same, okay? And if you need to talk … call me ... even before the three days are over. We’ll figure this out somehow.”


	5. you don’t have to pretend no one knows. — birdy, all about you

“Dude,” Nino said as he slid onto the bench in the corner of the café where he met Adrien three times a week in addition to Saturday to catch up. They had wanted to enrol into the same lycees but Nino’s family had moved halfway across town in the summer and although he had been willed to commute to stay with his best friend and his girlfriend, Adrien and Alya had managed to talk him out of it, mostly out of concern for the DJ’s sleep schedule.

And now, rather than to hang out each day at school, they had to make appointments, something that bothered Adrien. Nino had been his first real friend and he was still his best, and according to the books Adrien had read in the past, best friends should not have to have to schedule meetings three weeks in advance.

Marinette and Alya did not do that, as far as he knew.

 _Marinette_.

He groaned inwardly as he thought back to the way they had not managed to talk properly for two days now, the hours to the third day when they were supposed to meet and talk about it. The reveal of their identities had come at the worst possible moment, because he had a vague idea what had thrown her off so badly, what had caused her to take a break the way she had. She had figured out what his secret was. There was no doubt about it, because Ladybug knew Chat Noir well enough to predict his eight next moves, and even without the mask and the legacy clinging to their skin, Marinette was someone who was _smart._ She definitely knew and he had no idea what to say.

“Long time no see, stranger,” Adrien said with a grin, settling into the comfort this situation offered even though he was hyperaware of how somewhere else in town, Ladybug was in the company of his father. He had to get his mind off that or Nino would catch on, and that might lead to the kind of conversation Adrien had been trying to avoid for years now.

“I’m not the one stuck in internships — that’s you,” his best friend said cheerfully as he reached into his backpack and placed a small gift bag on the table, a smug grin on his face as he pushed it into Adrien’s direction. “I know you’re a Ladybug fan but when I stopped by at the merch store to pick up an anniversary present for Alya, I saw this and was like ‘that’s the right thing for my bro’,” he added proudly, rocking back and forth in his chair.

“My birthday isn’t for _months,_ ” Adrien pointed out as he reached for the present, shaking his head at his friend. It was not the first time that the DJ had gotten him something from the merchandise store as it was on his way to the usual meeting spots.

At this point, everyone had gotten more LadyNoir (as this was the official title for the merchandise line) products than they actually needed. Though Adrien could admit that the Ladybug-themed headband had a spot in his fencing bag — not just because it kept his hair out of his face during warmup but also because he had not lost a competition since he had gotten it. He had been unsure what to make exactly of the pyjamas that combined a red T-shirt with black spots and black shorts with green highlights but he had appreciated it nonetheless — nearly as much as he appreciated now, in retrospective, that he had not worn it for the sleepover they had had at Marinette’s place a bit ago.

(It would have been funny for him, then, but he would possibly have died from intense embarrassment the moment he had realised that he had worn these particular outfit in front of his crime-fighting partner.)

Lately, Nino had been moving from the Ladybug merchandise towards the Chat Noir one, and Adrien was wondering if his best friend was trying to tell him something.

“Yeah, still not sure if I’m gonna ask your father if I’m allowed to throw you a party in his house,” the other sighed, his face darkening for a moment as Adrien wanted to kick himself.

“...didn’t mean to bring up bad memories,” he sighed, running his hand through his hair although he wanted to connect it with his forehead. Lately, he had been anything but suave and he could thank his stars that he had not been in a situation where his way with words could affect his life.

“I’m doing — fine with that,” Nino said slowly, his eyes duller than usual behind his glasses, lacking their spark of life. “I mean, it’s over. For me. No one ever got possessed twice after the … thing was cleansed so … I have nothing to fear, do I?” he added quickly, his bravado crumbling towards the end and his trembling hands dropping from the table.

“There’s counselling,” Adrien said weakly as he pulled on the strings that kept the gift bag closed, but his mind was not on the present. It had been about a year and a half ago that Ladybug and Chat Noir had been approached about the official merchandise concepts, and the company behind the LadyNoir line had asked how they wanted to be compensated. It had been Adrien-as-Chat-Noir who had declined the offer to receive money directly from the company, and it had been Marinette-as-Ladybug who had suggested that instead, a percentage of the money should be used to _treat the consequences of the attacks the Miraculous Cure could not fix_ , a thought Adrien had appreciated.

“You sound like my boss,” Nino said with a groan as he rested his forehead on the table.

 _Nino’s boss._ **_Nino’s job_ **. Two mysteries Adrien had yet to solve, and probably would never crack. It had started about a year ago, he supposed, that Nino worked on every second Sunday, but he had never elaborated on where he worked, asking for some understanding from his friends. And as Nino was not exactly the person people thought of when they heard the word ‘untrustworthy’, no one had pried for answers, respecting his private life instead and refraining from coming up with the wildest theories, no matter how hard that was for some people (namely Alya). But sometimes, it was difficult not to ask, because Nino slipped up. Not often, but often enough to paint a rather positive picture of his work and his boss, one that made people wonder why he wanted to keep it a secret.

“He got a point, maybe,” the model said calmly as his hands clenched to fists. It had been his father’s fault that Nino had been vulnerable to Hawkmoth’s powers, and if Gabriel _was_ Hawkmoth, all of this would be cast in a much sharper light.

“The old man has a point, but you have a present,” the DJ said with a shrug as he sat back up, his carefree attitude returning quickly.

Adrien sighed inwardly, but did not push the issue because Nino would know better than anyone else whether or not he should seek professional help to deal with the lingering consequences of Hawkmoth’s control. And ultimately, as someone who had never had his emotions exploited by the villain, Adrien knew that it was not his place to tell his best friend what he would be the best course of action.

Instead, he opened the present and suppressed a snort when he looked at the black phone charm with the neon green paw print. “Really?” he sighed and shook his head, but the feeling of pure happiness was impossibly denied. Getting presents — whether it was the latest merchandise that made Nino laugh, prototypes of Marinette’s designs or the results of Alya’s knitting experiments — never failed to remind Adrien that he had friends, true friends who would still be there for him if everything else went to hell. And this was what he had to remember whenever he grew hopeless at the outlook of his father being Hawkmoth.

But as he attached the charm to his phone, inwardly rolling his eyes at himself, he noticed that he had received five text messages from Marinette. He cursed inwardly — he should not have muted his phone, not when she was taking a walk in the lion’s den. With a slight frown, he opened the messages to read them quickly, hoping that nothing _terrible_ had happened so far.

On the other side of the table, the DJ angled his head and then, he sat down next to Adrien, a grin growing on his face. “Did your lady love text you to ask about your internship at her parents’ business?” he asked with a suspiciously innocent expression on his face, but the blond did not even reply because while it was not quite _terrible,_ it did qualify as **bad** and he should have replied nearly an hour ago, right when he had been told that he take a longer break today by Mme Cheng — “call me Sabine, sunshine, like Alya and Nino do” — who had wanted him to enjoy the _last real sunshine before the winter_.

 

**From: Marinette**

 

> [txt ;; 11:48] your father asked me to have lunch with him  
>  [txt ;; 11:51] i said yes bc, you know, id be dumb to miss out on that   
>  [txt ;; 12:09] adrien   
>  [txt ;; 12:10] adrien   
> [txt ;; 12:22] ADRIEN WHATEVER YOUR MIDDLE NAME IS AGRESTE WHY DID YOUR FATHER JUST ASK ME HOW ‘SERIOUS’ I AM ABOUT YOU????

 

Next to him, Nino flinched and gave a sympathetic wince as Adrien paled under his Côte D'Azur tan. He had forgotten about that part. Well, not really forgotten. He had pushed it out of his mind and hoped that nothing would ever happen that would cause Marinette to become aware of this particular detail. However, he should have known better than to be this optimistic — he was Chat Noir, the mascot of bad luck.

“You told your old man Marinette — actual cinnamon bun Marinette Dupain-Cheng — was your girlfriend?” the DJ asked, his voice somewhere on the edge between genuine awe and slight disappointment. It was a thin line that probably had grown accustomed to Nino’s presence on it because lately, he tended to end up there whenever Adrien did something that was somehow connected to the young designer.

“I didn’t tell him that!” Adrien said quickly, chewing on his lip as he stared down at his phone. Well, yes, he _had_ , but he had not expected his father to be straightforward enough ask Marinette about it. Luckily, she was an good actress, right? She **had** hidden the Ladybug thing for years, after all.

“That’s something you might wanna tell Marinette or you’ll be in a lot of trouble,” the DJ remarked as he leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head, a grin that showed far too many teeth growing on his face. “Unless that’s your way of asking her out … having your father do it for you.”

It answered some questions, Adrien supposed.

For example, what exactly Nino had been trying to say lately. There had been many subtle and not so subtle matchmaking attempts from both Alya and Nino over the course of the past year and more, but neither Marinette nor Adrien had ever reacted to them, rather pretending like they had never happened. At first, because of his lingering feelings for Ladybug, feelings that had gotten confusing even before he had learned that there was no enigma hiding behind the mask but one of his closest friends, someone he cared for deeply and genuinely admired. Then, his suspicions in regards to his father had grown much less abstract and the idea of dragging _anyone_ into his mess of a life had grown increasingly less appealing.

 

**To: Marinette**

 

> [txt ;; 12:31] Um  
>  [txt ;; 12:31] I may have been purposefully ambiguous in regards to the nature of our relationship?
> 
>  

Next to him, Nino sighed deeply, a reaction Adrien had nothing but the utmost understanding for. Because he had been the one to mess up and as far as social _faux pas_ went, this was probably making the Top Five as he should have warned her at the very least rather than to hope that he could keep it hidden. In fact, he was not even sure what he had been thinking; she was his partner and he should have told her that she might be running into knives during her internship, just like she had told him all he needed to know when he had first talked about doing his final internship at her parents’ bakery in a clear violation to his father’s rules.

It had been a bit of a gamble, a test to see how the man would react to this, but whatever Adrien had expected, it had not been that his father would raise his eyebrows, purse his lips and tell him that he would have to take the internship seriously as anything else was simply _unbecoming_ for his son. And _then,_ Gabriel Agreste had written an email to Mme Cheng that essentially boiled down to the Gabriel-ised of _‘I hope that my son is not taking advantage of his friendship to your daughter, and I thank you for granting him the opportunity of broadening his horizon’_ — something that had made Adrien laugh when Marinette had mentioned the email (and her mother’s struggle to reply to it) because the man was a hypocrite. He had been the one who had kept Adrien homeschooled for years, who had personally limited his son’s horizon as far as this had been possible for him.

“If I wanted to ask her out, I’d obviously do it myself,” Adrien huffed as his phone’s screen lit up again a new message arrived.

 

**From: Marinette**

 

> [txt ;; 12:32] he made it sound like i should be proposing by next week  
> [txt ;; 12:32] suppose he didn’t leave to call you about the flower arrangements when he left ‘for a moment’, half an hour ago?
> 
>  

As she had done this a thousand times before as Ladybug, Marinette was unsurprisingly good at this, at passing on the _important_ information — that his father’s whereabouts were currently unaccounted for — amidst casual banter. Not that this necessarily meant anything. During his own investigations, Adrien had failed to discover a distinct pattern between his father’s habit of excusing himself and disappearing without a trace for a bit and Hawkmoth’s attacks. Sometimes, something happened. Other times, all stayed quiet.

For a moment, his fingers hovered above the keyboard as he contemplated his reply. Then, he gave himself a shove and channeled as much _Chat Noir_ as he could without donning the mask for the next reply, one that caused Nino to snort and shake his head, whispering just how hopeless Adrien was.

 

**To: Marinette**

 

> [txt ;; 12:34] I am fond of the view from your balcony, in case you need any inspiration  
>  [txt ;; 12:34] && I’ll tell him that , should he ask me   
> [txt ;; 12:35] Please keep me posted, yes?
> 
>  

“...be happy that Alya isn’t here to witness this,” he grumbled into his overly-sugary espresso as he shook his head. “This is getting out of hand.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Adrien muttered as he pocketed his phone after turning its volume up, focusing on his best friend again.

“You work for her parents, she works for your dad,” the DJ said in a tone that made it sound as if he was explaining basic rules of the world to a toddler as he wiggled his eyebrows and pointed at Adrien. “That screams _engagement_ to me … maybe your father isn’t that far off this time,” he mused aloud.

To his infinite embarrassment, Adrien felt heat creep up his neck and into his cheeks.  “It’s … it’s _complicated_ ,” he muttered, although this was probably not even beginning to cover just how messy things between Marinette and him were at the moment.

Not only had they learned, very recently, that they had been fighting akuma together for three years now, they were also investigating a man who was her role model and his father. And even _that_ was not even touching the aspect that at some point, she had liked his Adrien-side just as much as he had liked the Ladybug inside of her — before feelings like that had turned into something that had to be locked up and only evaluated when no one could possibly exploit them.

A chair was pulled back and a heavy bag was thrown down between them when Alya sat down on Nino’s deserted chair with a groan. “I love Mme Chamack but I want to die,” she grumbled as she buried her head in her hands. “And I’m sorry to interrupt your man time.”

“That sarcastic tone wasn’t necessary, _ange_ , we’re very manly men,” Nino said with an affectionate as he reached out and ruffled her already frazzled hair. “Anything new?”

“I was gonna ask you about that,” the blogger said as she rolled her shoulders.

“I learned how to make éclairs today,” Adrien answered with a shrug as he stared down on his phone, willing Marinette to update him on her current situation. He was tense and moments away from waking Plagg from his nap and get him to transform and personally check up on her. “And Mme Che— _Sabine_ wanted to teach me about arrangements later.”

He genuinely adored the woman and the warm kindness that radiated from her just as much as he appreciated her habit of silently refilling his plate with a conspiratorial smile. He had not met her often and he had rarely spent time with her alone as he usually was Marinette’s guest when he visited, but the day before, he had spent the afternoon with her and it had been _fun_ . He had kept up with his Chinese lessons, even when Natalie had told him that he did not _have_ to, and to get to freely converse with someone who gently corrected mistakes and did not sigh exasperatedly when he stumbled over the same term for the fifth time in a row had rekindled his passion for the language. Maybe he would ask her if he could help out a bit during the summer to keep up with these conversations — that would be nice.

“How many cookies did you get today?” Nino asked with a knowing smirk just as Alya leaned forward, raising her eyebrows and whispering: “How many times did you call her Mme Cheng today?”

“Okay, so, a) I’m not doing my internship there to get free cookies, I happen to learn a lot and,” Adrien said with a dramatic huff as he crossed his arms and pouted at his friends before he broke character and started to grin far too broadly because it was just not possible for him to even pretend to feel grim when he was talking about the personified sunshine that was Sabine Cheng or her teddy bear of a husband, M ‘just call me Tom, kid’ Dupain. “And I am _broadening my horizon_. And b) I’m getting better at calling her Sabine. Just wait, you’re gonna be jealous when we get friendship bracelets.”

“Honestly, right now, I wish Sabine was my boss,” Alya said with a dramatic sigh.

“Eh, I’m good with mine — he’s pretty funny,” Nino said with a sly grin as he adjusted his cap. “But tell me your sorrows, Ms Césaire, and let this charming DJ make them disappear.”

Adrien smiled to himself for a moment before his thoughts wandered away from the café for a while, but when he checked his phone and found that there were no new messages from Marinette, he felt more than just a twinge of concern. Though, to be fair, he was not even sure whether he wanted something to happen or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sabine Cheng is everything.  
> also, catch me on tumblr @blendisms (url might change in the future) if you have any questions etc?


	6. there’s no more trying, time to sort yourself out. — all time low, missing you

Marinette’s first step after coming home from the second day of her internship at the Gabriel Brand was to mention for Adrien to follow her to her room. The idea to take three days to rearrange all ideas and concepts had been nice, but with the way things had been going, their conversation had to happen earlier than planned. 

The next step was to let Tikki out of the bag and to sit down on the floor, leaning against the wall as she contemplated the day as she waited for her partner to say something. The lunch had been less terrifying than she had expected it to be, but she had made too little progress for her taste. She had been tempted to follow her current boss, to figure out where he was going. It would have been anything but subtle, but subtlety had not gotten Adrien anywhere and so she doubted it would help her.

“So,” the blond started awkwardly, brushing the last traces of flour off his shoulders as he sat down next to her. 

“Are we okay?” she asked softly, reaching out to wipe powdered sugar from his cheek.

The question had burned on her tongue for a while now. She wanted them to be okay, no, she  _ needed _ it. Because she could not do this alone, and she did not even want to try. 

Adrien’s jumped up as if lightning had struck him, pacing up and down in front of her desk. “I-I  _ think  _ so,” he muttered as he ran a hand through his messy hair. “Of course, if you think I’m — I’m  _ compromised _ …”

Her heart raced as she hastily shook her head. 

She could not leave him in this state of him, with these grim thoughts. When she had wanted to quit after her first failure and the trouble that had followed, he had convinced her to stay in the game rather than to just fold the cards and give up without a fight. Now, it was her turn to keep them together, to fix what had been broken, because he was not supposed to look like that, crestfallen and apologetic for something that was only a theory, for something that would not be his fault if it was true. It made her heart ache, and she kept looking at him because he was her friend, her partner, her other half. 

“You are not compromised, Adrien,” she said as she squared her shoulders and looked up at him. “You’re brave, and you’re a hero and … I care about you. A lot.”

She wished that she was brave enough and call the way she felt by its name, to tell him that she loved him and that she always would, that it did not matter what his father did as long as he was still himself. But she had learned the hard way that admitting feelings took more bravery than to take the jump off the Eiffel Tower.

He stared back at her as if she had suddenly started to speak not Chinese but a language he did not understand. And she hated this because he was her partner and her friend and she  _ loved _ him. His misplaced guilt reverberated around her, and she wanted to make his frown go away, because none of this was his fault. He had not chosen his family; he had been born into a family that was secrets upon secrets the same way Marinette had been born into one filled with warmth and kindness.

For a while, near perfect silence reigned. And Marinette tried to pour all her heart into the moment, ignoring the whispered conversation between Plagg and Tikki. Hawkmoth could be dancing the cancan in front of her house and Marinette would not  _ want  _ to go out and face him, because right now, she did not care for him. Because it was more important that Adrien  _ believed  _ her when she said that she did not want to give him up because of what might happen. She had given up before, and she was not going to do this ever again.

“I don’t like seeing you hurt,” she whispered, choosing her words carefully. “And … no matter what we find, I will trust you, the way I always did.”

He held her stare, uncounted emotions rushing through his eyes as his hands trembled at his sides. He froze when their eyes met, looking at her with a lost expression on his face. “Thank you,” he said as he tore on his own hair.

It was not enough.

She got up, crossing the room quickly (before she could start to question herself) and wrapped her arms around him, then she rested her head against his shoulder and held him close, wishing that the Ladybug luck would cling to him for once, that it would protect him the way he protected her.

She closed her eyes for a moment and just  _ breathed  _ before she clapped her hands and returned to her spot on the floor, still trying to chase the heavy mood away, because this was what she had dreaded so much after they had de-transformed at the wrong place at the wrong time — the way it meant that the easy camaraderie between Chat Noir and Ladybug would shift into something else, something she could not describe yet. “I have cookies and something to drink here — oh, I should be getting cheese for Plagg, no?” she added, trying to ramble past the awkwardness.

“He’s ahead of you on that,” Tikki said with a groan, sending a scathing look into the direction of her counterpart who was lounging on the shelf, chewing the camembert.

“I’m sorry,” Adrien said with a sigh as he shook his head. “Plagg’s—”

“ _ —gluttonous _ ,” the spotted kwami muttered darkly before she reached for a cookie, her disapproval palpable.

“You two,” Plagg started with an offended huff as he looked up from his meal, “should never have met. They  _ bully  _ me, Lady— Mari— Maribug?” 

Marinette laughed as she felt how some of the tension was purged from her body, allowing her to breathe air rather than worry. “I would’ve gotten you cheese if you had asked,” she said as she reached for a cookie.

“That’s it, we’re moving here, Adrien,” the boy’s kwami declared suspiciously cheerfully as he pointed at him. “The cheese is great, I want to stay.”

Tikki rolled her eyes as Adrien groaned exasperatedly at Plagg, but Marinette chuckled as she raised her eyebrows at her partner. “I think that’s a great idea, Adrien. You could live out on the balcony since you like the view so much,” she said with a small smile as autumn rain slammed against the windows. It had gotten easier to keep her wits around Adrien rather than to stumble over her every word when they had become close friends, and now that she knew that he was Chat Noir, that he was a not simply an incarnation of perfection, someone with an exterior that mirrored his kind heart and his gentle soul, it had become even easier for her.

She supposed that this helped right now because otherwise, she would have been helpless and entirely out of her element.

“You know what they say about cats and water,” he retorted with a dramatic shudder as he sat down on the chair near her desk, spinning around like a child before he turned towards her and stilled, his forehead in careful wrinkles. “How was lunch?” he asked quietly.

She groaned before she buried her face in her hands, feeling heat rising. “...informative,” she finally muttered as she faced him again. “I suppose I managed the invasive questions about our relationship just fine.”

Adrien sighed, lifting his hands and throwing his giggling kwami a sharp glare. “I did what I had to do, but — sorry for the awkward lunch,” he apologised and fell silent for a brief moment before he squared his shoulders and looked back at her. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him you want a fall wedding,” she deadpanned, shaking her head at him. “No, seriously … I couldn’t flatout ask whether he’s Hawkmoth or not so I mentioned jewellery and watched for reactions.”

“More weird interest in your earrings?” Her partner made a face when she nodded slowly, then he continued to speak. “He’s not helping his case, should he be innocent.”

“I still think the biggest — hint is the book,” Marinette said as she pursed her lips. 

She had not understood what exactly Master Fu’s plan had been, but she knew that the guardian was no longer in possession of the book and that it had reappeared in the man’s safe. She had asked about potential designs to  _ reacquire  _ it but the old man had assured her that the situation was under control. She  _ hoped  _ that this meant that the book did not contain any knowledge that was dangerous in the wrong hands, but she feared that it might mean that it had been more important to keep Chat Noir’s civilian identity a secret than to have the book.

“The book isn’t a hint, the book is solid proof,” her partner said with a pained expression on his face as he tapped his fingers against the desk.

Marinette nodded slowly as she made a face, staying silent as her eyes flickered to the family picture on her desk. “The book isn’t the most relevant thing right now,” she said as she lowered her gaze. She knew that this was a daring, near reckless thing to say but compared to the suffering of the kwami that had fallen into the wrong hands, the fate of an inanimate object did not weigh too much on her conscience.

“Wouldn’t either of you be able to … sense Nooroo?” Adrien asked absentmindedly as he swirled around on the spinning chair, looking from his kwami to hers. Marinette looked up from her feet, her gaze following his as she chewed on her lip. Their thoughts were in sync, and she let out a breath she must have been holding since the moment the transformation had dropped in the wrong moment.

“Believe me … I lived with you for three years, kiddo, and if I had felt him in that time, I would’ve told you,” Plagg said with a snort before he looked over to Tikki who was silent, a pensive frown on her face as she floated near the bookshelf. “What about you, Spot?”

“I don’t think Hawkmoth would have Nooroo with him when he’s out in the open,” she said softly as she looked back at her partner, an endlessly kind and warm expression on her eyes as she continued to speak, choosing her words carefully. “Nooroo would let us know, I think,” she added quietly as she wrung her hands nervously.

“Wayzz felt Nooroo being used for evil, didn’t he?” Marinette asked as she looked down at the plate with cookies in the middle of the room, right next to the orangina bottle and the plate with the éclairs that had not been sold. She closed her eyes for a moment; the scene was too — homely, too cosy to mirror how serious and fraught the situation was. “Couldn’t he find him?”  she added with a shrug.

The kwami exchanged a quick glance that seemed to speak volumes, a silent argument that Tikki seemed to be losing, because after a moment, Plagg spoke slowly. “We aren’t really supposed to mention this, but Wayzz is … in transit,” he muttered before he shook his head, a displeased expression on his face.

“Master Fu might decide to pass the Turtle Miraculous on so that the next … Chosen can fight the battles he can’t wage anymore,” Tikki added, her voice flat but lacking the open disapproval Plagg had shown, but it showed that she had concerns as well. “But a lot depends on this so … we don’t know when we’ll see the Chosen,” she finished.

On the desk, the other kwami snorted before he made his way to Adrien’s bag. “Still thinking he should try to get Pyarr to pick someone because more offensive power would be kinda sweet,” he grumbled. “Her Highness has been slacking off.”

“You never like her Chosen,” Tikki replied as she looked up from her cookie.

“Most of her Chosen start out pretty terrible until they embrace the  _ bee _ ling,” her partner snorted.

“She said she’s gonna make a hat out of you if you ever antagonise her Chosen again,” Tikki said with a long-suffering sigh, shaking her large head.

“That sounds—” Adrien started with a growing grin, leaning forward.

_ “Don’t,” _ Marinette pleaded, burying her head in her hands. She had changed her mind, she had not missed the puns at all. Okay, that was a lie. She had missed them, because they were part of what made her partner the person he was, and she had missed all the little things he had lost when he had started to investigate his father.

“—like the bee’s a bit stingy,” he finished with a Chat-esque wink, as Plagg howled with laughter and Tikki made a face like she had been in this situation too many times before.

“ _ Why _ ,” the girl whispered as she dramatically splayed herself out on her chaiselongue.

“As I was saying … even if there are new Chosen, they might not jump into the fray right away,” Tikki continued absentmindedly as she settled down atop of Marinette’s head.

“We did that … but things have changed since,” Adrien mused aloud, biting into a cookie.

It was true. 

Hawkmoth had gotten smarter when it came to picking his victims, and rather than to just create as many akuma as possible, he had taken to akumatising people who had inherent talents and skills that he could use. She was not sure how she felt about that; she only knew that while the fights were more difficult, it was better than the time when their enemy had created akuma like they were going out of fashion.

“But Master Fu and someone else are still active, aren’t they?” Marinette asked quietly, squinting up at Tikki. If they could not receive help from someone new, maybe they could count on someone who had been doing this for longer than they had. And even if it was only for patrol or other aspects of being a Miraculous holder that were not fighting Hawkmoth’s akuma; she had long lowered her expectations drastically.

Plagg grumbled something that sounded like  _ that damn blogger  _ before he stared grimly at the plate in the middle of the room.

“Yes, there are active Miraculous holders who aren’t you or Master Fu or Hawkmoth at the moment,” Tikki said slowly, each word pronounced on its own. “But — it’s not that easy.”

“What Spot means is that historically speaking, some combinations are a goddamn nightmare,” the black cat groaned as he shook his head, before he frowned deeply and continued to speak. “That’s why I’d prefer a Pyarr Chosen over another fox.”

“The fox miraculous won’t be given out to someone in Paris, the guardian said that,” Adrien yawned as he leaned back in his chair. “Something about the image?”

The aspiring designer snorted. 

Paris had been quick to realise that Volpina had not been the gamechanger in the fight against Hawkmoth’s iron grip on the town. And while she had felt guilty at first — that Lila had been this vulnerable had been on her as she should have handled the situation more delicately than she had at fifteen — she had stopped thinking that it had been all her fault, after Volpina had shown up for the fifth time. No other person had been possessed at many times as the new girl, and towards the end, some had started to suspect that the girl was in league with Hawkmoth, that she had been willed to trade Miraculouses for power. Ultimately, she had moved away after half a year, and Marinette had breathed easier again. Because not only had Lila-as-Volpina been an unpleasant person to fight but that she had been akumatised more than once had been a novelty, and she had not wanted to get used to the fight that certain opponents would return.

(Another fight against Chronogirl was nothing she wanted and so she had taken to check up on Alix every once in a while, happy to learn that the girl was content with her life and it was unlikely that she would be akumatised again, unless something happened.)

Marinette smiled thinly as Plagg made a noise that sounded suspiciously like ‘good’, and Tikki sighed deeply, again, while Adrien left the chair by the desk behind, sitting down on the edge of the chaiselongue, next to her feet. She sat up, picking Tikki up and placing her carefully on the pillow next to Plagg who yawned dramatically and moved to the side.

“I feel like an idiot,” Adrien muttered slowly as he reached out, brushing a strand of hair back behind her ear. “I feel like I should’ve recognised you.”

She leaned forward as he kept messing with her hair, twirling it around his fingers and trying to braid it. “I didn’t want to let people recognise me,” she said softly as she looked at their kwamis who were watching them with thinly veiled amusement (Tikki) and subtle annoyance (Plagg) from their pillow. She knew, she should say something about the way he seemed set on styling her hair, but she stayed quiet. If he wanted to ‘groom’ her, she would hardly complain because it was calming to have someone play with her hair. In addition, it was a pretty  _ cat  _ thing to do, and as such, it was something that suited her partner.

“...I think I know why — as Ladybug, you’re on a pedestal,” he muttered as he gently pulled the hair ties out of her hair before he combed it with his fingers, frowning as he started to braid it into a neat plait which he then twisted into a bun.

“I think you know a thing or two about them, Mr Supermodel,” she nodded slowly when he dropped his hands back to his sides. Being someone who was expected to be close to perfection, to be a flawless role model was stressful, especially as this role had been given to her when she had been a teenager who had tried to figure herself out. As Ladybug, she was judged based on much higher moral considerations than when she was simply Marinette, and sometimes, she had cursed this because — she had been out of her element for the first few months, had needed time to get used to the role and her responsibilities.

“You got that one right,” he sighed as he checked his wristwatch. “And I suppose I should be getting back into my golden cage … keep me posted if  _ he  _ acts weird tomorrow?”

“Sure,” she promised with a smile.

“And, um, if you don’t mind … leave him in the belief we’re dating? It might be safer for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah yes, the fake dating aesthetic.


	7. on a wednesday in a café i watched it begin again — taylor swift, begin again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am happy to announce this: they will talk. also the title of this chapter is like 99% ironic

It was Thursday afternoon when Adrien saw Marinette again. 

Or better said: when he saw Ladybug again, only that he had stopped making a difference between them because to him, they were  _ the same _ ; Marinette was Ladybug without the mask and Ladybug was Marinette with a mask. As it was no day when he was supposed to be on patrol (due to his class with M D’Argencourt earlier that day and Ladybug’s insistence that her partner should not neglect his real life), the reason why they were sitting on a rooftop was that an akuma had attacked, just when he had gotten out of class — and the attack had left them both shaken because for the first time since Lila, someone had been akumatised for a second time. It had been Kim, which had already spelled out that it would be a fight that demanded them to be on top of their game. 

But a few things about this akuma had thrown them off because while Lila had been Volpina each time, Kim had not become the  Dislocoeur for his second akumatisation .  Instead, he had been turned into the Server, an akuma who had taken to throwing his tray like a discus and who had possessed a worrisome control over the rest of the restaurant’s interior as well. However, compared to Kim’s previous akumatisation, the Server had been easily defeated, requiring no Cataclysm and even the Lucky Charm had been merely a formality so that Marinette had been able to clean up the mess.

“I’m not complaining that this was too easy, but it was,” Marinette said as she sat down on the edge of the roof next to her partner after letting Tikki recharge.

“It definitely breaks with Hawkmoth’s pattern of sending increasingly stronger akuma after us,” Adrien nodded as he tapping his clawed fingers against the floor, his gaze focusing on Kim as the athlete sipped the water the owner of the restaurant he had been working at had handed him. “Kim’s usually a better discus-thrower than that,” he added as an afterthought.

It was something he had realised when the tray had missed him by nearly a metre. In fact, he had nearly called out ‘Alix wouldn’t have missed’ before he had realised that egging his former classmate on might not be the smartest idea as it would certainly have prompted a reaction. The competition between Kim and his friend-slash-rival was still happening, after all, and even though they were visiting different lycees, they could frequently be seen either challenging each other or completing dares.

“Lucky us,” his partner said with a frown. “Dislocoeur was — a piece of work.”

Adrien grimaced. 

He had never mentioned that when he had gotten home a few days after the memorable Valentine’s Day when he had been turned against her, footage of the fight had shown up on the ladyblog because while Alya had not been there to film the fight, someone else had done so, and he had watched it as dread had grown inside of him. Cataclysm. He had tried to use this power on her, had wanted to harm her.

And he had wanted to apologise, because even though he had been under the influence of an akuma, he had been way out of line, but he had not known how to bring it up. And so time had passed, but he had never forgotten, had kept waiting for a moment to bring it up. Apparently, the moment was now.

“You shouldn’t have had to fight him and me at once,” he said carefully as he looked at her.

“You took the arrow for me,” she replied gently, her red-gloved hand touching his arm as she turned towards him. “And — when you are under the influence of an akuma, you’re never on top of your game,” she added thoughtfully.

He frowned. He had never liked to watch the videos of the fights when that had occurred as watching fights when he had fought his partner rather than to fight with her. Looking at it made him feel terrible, like he had let her down. And each time she had to fight him, she lost time she could spent on fighting the akuma.

“It’s the only time I can win against you, probably,” she continued softly before he could speak, looking away from him and towards her feet. “It’s — when you are you, we’re in sync. The moment you stop being you, that stops. You — stop reading my moves, but I still read yours,” she finished with a weak shrug.

“I’m scared,” he admitted quietly. It was no thought he allowed himself often: the thought that one day, he might end up truly hurting her. Even though she was certainly right — he reacted strictly based on instincts when he was trapped in the haze that did not allow him to think straight — there was a risk that one day, her luck would run out and his bad luck would decide to ruin him by letting him win against her.

“I’ve been trying to keep you safe,” she muttered as she pulled her legs against her torso, her chin resting on her knees as she wrapped her arms around herself. “Not in the — take a hit way but … I’m more cautious. I try not to put you into the situation where you have to make the choice,” she confessed, still not looking at him. “Neither of us can do this alone.”

She was right. Deep down, he knew this. He knew that he was necessary, that there was a reason why his suit was equipped the way it was, why it was the suit of a fighter while hers was clearly made for an acrobat. He was supposed to prepare the stage so that his partner, his lady could cleanse the akuma. And preparing the stage, making sure that Marinette could do her job — it was something that came with risks. And while he took the risks, she made sure that if all paid off in the end.

“We are partners,” she said as she gently squeezed his shoulder. “You and me, to the end.”

“What a grim thing to say, My Lady,” he replied with a grin that came easy to him.

She did not speak for a bit (because what was there still to say?), rather looking at Kim again. “Maybe we should find out why he got akumatised again before this becomes Hawkmoth’s new modus operandi,” Marinette suggested as she got up, and Adrien nodded. 

Of course, if he was Hawkmoth and had had to make a list with which former akuma would make dangerous opponent for Ladybug and Chat Noir, he would definitely consider Kim as one of the most promising candidates; he was athletic and took to most things that relied on muscle like a fish took to water, meaning that no matter what weapon Hawkmoth put into his hand, Kim would be able to quickly learn how to use it effectively.

“And I think we have someone help us with that,” he said as he mentioned towards the yard below them, where Alix was pushing through the crowd. She had not grown much since they had been in collège together, but just like it had been then, she did not need to be tall to get things to go her way; her somewhat abrasive personality cleared the path for her. 

“Me— Kim,” she addressed the taller boy, who was staring up at her as if he had never seen her before, while she tapped her foot against the ground.

“The tooth fairy made her appearance,” he replied flatly as he got up to tower over her once more. Compared to his usual energetic self, he moved like he was underwater, and Adrien winced. Kim was definitely going to get a visit from Chat Noir, telling him that he should attend some of the meetings that were held for akuma victims. It seemed necessary; Kim had not looked as shaken the last time around.

The skater grimaced at the nickname she had gained when she had slammed her elbow into a stranger’s face when he had tried to grab her, a move that had resulted in the loss of two teeth. “I didn’t know you were working here,” Alix said after a moment, crossing her arms over her chest and staring up at her friend. There was something vaguely accusing in her voice and Adrien wondered why Alix was speaking like this, as if she was entitled to knowing about Kim’s whereabouts.

“His parents are in Korea to visit family and he stays with Alix under the week and with Max during the weekends,” Marinette supplied before Adrien could ask as she leaned dangerously far over the edge.

Kim was quiet for a moment, trying to stare her down and failing, because he was tired and because Alix was as fierce as she was little. “...I broke Max’ glasses on accident,” he muttered as he looked away from the pink-haired girl. “So I bought new ones from the money I had saved up for your birthday present.”

“My birthday isn’t until spring,” Alix pointed out, just when Adrien realised the same thing. It was not that he had ever been overly close to her but they had been in the same class for a while and he knew that her birthday was shortly after his and between now and then, the autumn and winter birthdays would take place — such as Marinette’s in mid-December.

“I, uh, had seen something you might like and wanted to get it for you before someone else can,” Kim replied as he scratched the back of his neck.

“Are they dating?” Adrien asked as he turned towards Marinette who was shrugging. Back in collège, he would not even have gotten the thought — their relationship had consisted of dares and rematches, Alix’s sigh and her hisses when her cap had been knocked off her head, and Kim’s boisterous laughter and the  _ twenty-seven  _ nicknames he had had for her. Adrien would have expected that by now, one of them would have grown tired, that they had stopped spending time together. Apparently, he had been wrong. Maybe he would ask Juleka about this; she was in their class and would know.

“I don’t have a clue,” Marinette admitted, averting her gaze and heading towards the other side of the roof as the duo in the yard was discussing their current issues in soft, hushed voices. Adrien followed his partner quickly, his feet making barely a sound as he jumped to leap across a roof to settle down on the near hidden balcony of an apartment that was usually silent and empty. 

(Adrien always knew when no one was home as the owner was a woman who travelled around the world to find cloth and other necessities for his father.)

“I’ll go have a  _ chat _ with Kim on my way back,” he said as he looked at his partner who seemed to be lost in thought, something that was hardly out of the usual when the akuma had been something they knew without the mask. “Ma— ma coccinelle?” he asked softly, quickly correcting himself, as he shook her shoulder. 

“Ah — sorry,” she apologised as she brushed back a strand of her hair, her hands shaking. “I was thinking … I kinda expected that Alix would grow tired of Kim’s dares.”

Adrien would have expected the same, truth be told, because Alix was not exactly known for an abundance of patience. It was the opposite; someone had joked once that the only thing that was shorter than the skater was her temper, causing her to nearly implode, but it seemed like the pink-haired girl had more patience than most would have expected her to. So maybe Adrien was right, maybe they were dating. He would just ask Juleka or, even better,  _ Rose  _ about that the next time he met them; one of them was bound to know.

“Anyway,” Marinette continued as she looked at the empty alleyway beneath them. “How about we give the kwami a break and get some coffee?”

“Excellent idea,” he sighed as he followed her downwards, allowing Plagg to release the transformation the moment his feet touched the ground. “The usual place?”

* * *

There were some things Marinette would have expected when she pushed open the door to the coffee shop Nino had discovered during the time when the akumatised architecture student had stirred up trouble. For example, she knew that it was only a matter of time until Adrien’s fangirls would hear about the place and arrive in hordes. Nino and Alya, enjoying a date after filming the attack of the Server, would also have failed to surprise her. What she had not expected had been this: Master Fu, sitting on the table in the corner they were usually sitting at, three cups in front of him.

“I guess we were expected,” Adrien said as he made his way over to the table. Marinette followed, a frown on her face. She trusted the guardian, but that did not mean that she was not surprised to see him in public. Usually, when he wanted to see them, he passed a message along rather than to just appear.

“Hello,” the old man greeted calmly as he pushed the drinks into their direction once that had sat down. “That was an — enlightening fight.”

Marinette raised her eyebrow. “How so?” she asked as she stirred sugar into her tea.

“Well, the boy who was tainted today … would you say that you expected the fight to go like that?” he asked, lifting his cup from the table and staring out of the window where the late afternoon crowds were passing by, hurrying to catch a metro or to get the treat that had gotten them through the day by simply thinking about it.

“He didn’t fight the way he usually would,” Adrien said slowly after exchanging a glance with Marinette and another moment of contemplation. “Suppose that’s what you mean?”

“Yes … I believe that the more Hawkmoth looks at his victims’ natural skills and tendencies, the more likely it becomes that he needs to give them — leeway when it comes to using them,” the old man mused aloud, grey brows furrowed above ancient eyes.

Marinette’s brows furrowed. She was willed to see this as  _ good news,  _ but she had lowered the bar for them long ago. If it was a double-edged blade for Hawkmoth to create stronger akuma because completely overruling the victim’s personality was not possible when he wanted them to tap into their own skillset, it was something they might be able to exploit. At the same time, it sounded logical; Nathanael who had relied greatly on his skills as an artist when he had been the Dessinateur had been more interested into his owl goals and far less Miraculous-oriented than other akuma.

“I really need to check up on Kim later,” Adrien muttered as he leaned back in his chair.

She nodded, making a mental note to increase her visits as Ladybug at Alix’ place. Neither the skater nor the rest of her family had been akuma she wanted to fight again, and if they might be facing Hawkmoth’s idea of an  _ encore,  _ she would prefer to have some influence on which akuma would be involved in this — and Chronogirl was on the  **over my dead body** list for obvious reasons.

“Tell me what he says?” she asked as she furrowed her brows. If the pattern that had been consistent so far still applied, Kim’s second akumatisation had been the consequence of something that had happened while he had been at work — thus the Server. But while it often was easy to guess what had caused the akuma from what they said, Kim had been uncharacteristically quiet in regards to that.

“I’ll text you,” he promised. “And I’ll try to catch him without Alix.”

“If I may…” Master Fu interrupted calmly, but effectively as both teenagers fell silent. “I will be the one to suggest the support group to both of them. It might be … wiser.” 

Marinette’s grimace was mirrored on Adrien’s face. The old man had a point; it was sometimes difficult for them as Ladybug and Chat Noir to convince formerly akumatised citizens to visit one of the support groups or to talk to someone who was an expert on the field (three years of Hawkmoth in Paris had led to a whole new profession: post-akuma counselors). She suspected that a few might be embarrassed to be told this by someone who was a  _ teenager  _ (Paris had a pretty good idea how old they were at this point) and that others wanted to just forget about the ordeal, that they wanted to bury it in the back of their minds rather than to confront it. 

And as civilians, neither of them could push anyone into getting help to sort everything out because it only tended to remind people that they had never been affected in the past three years — and that made people ask how that could be. Which was why she tried to avoid the topic altogether.

“Tell us how that goes?” she asked as she brushed back a strand of her hair, her eyes fixed on her partner who not so unsuspiciously was sneaking cookies under the table, moments before the bag on her side suddenly felt lighter. She grinned against her mug.

“And I’ll still see if I can get any details from Kim,” Adrien added as his brows furrowed as he stared down at the table. He took the post-akumatisation conversations seriously, they both did. But these conversations were always both easier and far more difficult when the former akuma was someone they knew. It was easier because understanding and empathising came near natural when one had been there to witness the scene that had led to the akumatisation or when one had some basic knowledge about the person. And it was more difficult because there was always guilt involved — if they had beaten Hawkmoth already, their friends and family and acquaintances would be safe.

“I hope he’ll be fine,” Marinette sighed as her partner nodded solemnly.

“Ah, I need to get head to an appointment now but I’ll inform you about my conversation with your friend,” the guardian said with a warm smile as he got up, reaching for the staff that was simply a prop as Marinette suspected, something that added to the image of a man who had grown old and who was feeling his age. “You children enjoy your evening, yes?” he added as he walked off, leaving Adrien and Marinette to the million little things they should have addressed a long time ago, only to never do so.

“So,” Adrien said awkwardly as he looked up from his hands to face her. “Seems fitting that we … talk about Valentine’s Day, two years ago?”

It made sense as they had fought the same friend that day and today, and she hated that it made sense, because—

“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” she whispered as she looked at him, not even trying to avoid his eyes because there was nothing left to hide. When she had decided that she would not be the one to address it, this decision had not been connected to a solemn oath, she had not looked at the moon and whispered into the night that she would take the kiss and all it implied to her grave. However, nearly a year after the memorable Valentine’s day, Rose had said something that had reminded Marinette of the detail she had overlooked: that the stories spoke of  _ true love kisses,  _ not just ‘you care about your partner and don’t like to see him under control of an akuma’ kisses.

For five minutes, she had questioned whether she  _ had a type  _ — both Adrien and Chat Noir had blond hair and green eyes (which was no coincidence as she knew now) — which had lead her to the question whether she  _ maybe  _ had a crush on her partner but then, an akuma had attacked and she had had to deal with that. It had been a weird time when Hawkmoth had tried to wear them down by creating as many akuma as he could without much concern for their abilities and their strength. 

Afterwards, she had decided that as long as things were as they were, the question whether or not she had developed romantic feelings for Chat were inconsequential. Because acting upon them would only get them both into trouble, and so she had tucked the thought back into the back of her mind.

“I — I wanted to talk about it for a while,” Adrien muttered as he scratched his neck.

She sat up straight, squared her shoulders. “Okay,” she said, because what else was there to say? It had been years, they were close friends and each other’s confidants, and putting it off any further would not benefit them. “Let’s talk about it.”

His eyes widened and he spluttered, raising his hands and burying his face in them, but even this failed to hide the scarlet tips of his ears. “Really?” he asked, his voice a full octave higher than usual. “I, uh, didn’t expect that.”

She bit her lip, nearly giggling because this was  _ hilarious _ . Whatever she had expected when she had thought about this in the past, it had not been that Chat Noir’s civilian self would be  _ that  _ flustered. It was — strangely endearing. “We can always talk about this later if you’d prefer that,” she offered calmly.

“No, no, we should talk about this now,” he muttered as he pushed back his messy hair. “I mean —  _ you know,  _ don’t you?”

She frowned, brows furrowing. “Do I know that you have — had — have feelings for Ladybug?” she retorted, stumbling over her words because she did not even know what it was — things had been too confusing lately. “Or do I know that you know that I used to have a crush on you?” she finished quieter, awed and slightly intimidated by her own bravado. She had not questioned her heart how she felt about Adrien in a long time now, because either the flame inside her heart had dimmed into something different, something more stable than a crush  or because it had grown into more.

“Definitely yes on the first, a maybe on the second,” he replied after a moment, his fingers tapping quickly against the mug in his hands. “I — mostly suspected it.”

She nodded, silent, as she looked at him, at his kind green eyes. “I see,” she said weakly, but not hopeless. “What do we do with all of this now?”

It was a legitimate question in her eyes, because things had changed since she had last had an understanding of what her heart felt. In fact, she had been confused since Rose had reminded her that kissing people only worked when  _ true love _ was involved, and her confusion had only grown since she had learned who Chat Noir was when he was not Chat.

“I’m not sure,” he said with a shrug, chewing on his lip. “Any — thoughts?”

“I don’t know anything for sure at the moment,” she confessed. 

He exhaled. “Neither do I,” he said as he covered her hand with his, brushing his thumb over her wrist as he continued to talk. “I — I like you. A lot. As  _ you know  _ and as Marinette. When I didn’t know,  _ she  _ was … is — strong, dependable. Of course, I remember that you … grew into this, that you didn’t start at the top,” he muttered slowly, pausing for a moment. “And when I combine you and her, it’s a full story. It’s — it makes sense.”

It made sense to her, too. Ladybug and Adrien Agreste were similar — both were only part of a bigger truth, the part of the story that was arranged to look as perfect as possible when someone looked at them. They lacked the inflections that Marinette and Chat Noir respectively gave them, the depths that took the polished, flat version and turned it into something that was a complete person.

“...I know what you mean.” Marinette nodded. “There’s more to you than meets the eye.”

Because while Adrien Agreste was polite to the point where it hurt to watch him struggle to tell others to back off, Chat Noir was hardly the kind of guy to mince words. It had gotten — better, much better since Adrien had started to attend public school, but he had never fully shaken this off. With Chat Noir on the other hand, lines were quickly and clearly drawn; when something did not please him, he was guaranteed to address this.

Her partner, her friend smiled as he shrugged, his hand not leaving hers. “I think—” he started before he cleared his throat. “Marinette, if I may be this — forward,” he continued as he reached for her second hand as well. “This is messy and confusing but — I...”

“You know,” she said as she smiled at him, her heart soaring inside her chest because  _ yes,  _ this was happening, “Alya says the new movie is worth the money.”

For a moment, he stared at her, unblinkingly, but then his face broke into a wide smile. “I’ll buy the tickets,” he said softly. “The weekend after the internships end?”

“I’ll buy the popcorn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why the second half of the chapter?   
> first of all: it was time for this, believe me  
> secondly: Adrien was the narrator for the past two coffee shop/café scenes — it was only a matter of time until Marinette would get to narrate one as well


	8. don’t wanna live in fear and loathing. — marina and the diamonds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am lifting the amount of chapters from 10 to at least 12 because this chapter has the zentral twist, and I don't want to rush through the rest of the story

It was time for patrol. Actually, it had been time for patrol  _ fifteen minutes ago  _ but Plagg had been suspiciously quiet and Adrien had been lost in thoughts, losing track of time as he, once again, went over the compiled evidence which now included a copy of his father’s schedule which he had gotten from Natalie after telling her that he wanted to know when his father was absent in advance rather than to find out each time. It had been a lie, yes, but it had worked in his favour. Especially since he had learned that during his father’s travels, Hawkmoth was suspiciously quiet. This was no hard evidence, but it was something that made him feel like yes, he was right about his theory. Even though he had still not decided whether he  _ wanted  _ to be right about this.

(No, no, he did not want this to be true, but the evidence and the coincidences that had been piling up lately were condemning.)

He would have to mention that Gabriel’s absences and Hawkmoth’s silence overlapped to Marinette once they met up the next time — either for patrol or because they just spent time together because they were  _ dating  _ now. As frustrating as the thought of his father was, the fact that he was dating his friend, his partner, his lady always made him smile when he remembered it. It had made him happy if confused to realise that Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Ladybug were the same person, but after a few hours of realising that this meant that he had classes with his partner and that he knew her favourite snack and so many other little things that added depth to her, he had decided that it had been unusually lucky for him that his collège dream of dating Ladybug had stayed a dream.

Because Ladybug was not a complete person but merely a part of it.

To him, his spotted partner was a part of his  _ wonderfully energetic  _ friend Marinette, not the other way around. And as soon as they would go to watch the Alya-recommended movie, he would tell her that, because it was important for her to know before she started to think that he was picking the raisins out of the cake.

(After three years of knowing Marinette and two years of being her friend, Adrien knew her and her tendency to overthink things, and he adored, no,  **loved** her too much to let her question him.)

He had texted Nino about this new development right after he had gotten home from the coffee shop and a brief visit at Kim’s temporary home in the Kubdel residence. Adrien had considered to wait a bit with letting the DJ know, but then he had decided to tell him right away. After all, his best friend had been waiting for this for ages and letting him suffer any longer than it was necessary had seemed rather cruel to the model-slash-local-hero. As he had expected, Nino had been overjoyed to hear these news. There had been lines of ‘finally’ and ‘now we can have actual double dates’, and Adrien had briefly wondered how Marinette was faring with informing Alya about the change in the relationship status.

Afterwards, he had called Marinette to tell her about his talk with Kim.

It had been a memorable conversation by any standards. 

First of all, it had turned out that Kim had been approached by Hawkmoth after a guest (‘some dude in a fancy suit’) had tripped him and the part time waiter had gotten red wine and pizza all over another guest who had been enraged. The owner of the restaurant had been pressured to do ‘something about the incompetent oaf’ and had quickly declared that Kim would pay for the damage he had caused — something that would put a dent into his savings for Alix’ birthday present (cards and everything else for a skater meet in  _ America _ after graduation which coincided with a marathon Kim had been training for). 

The amount of thoughtfulness and money that had been invested into this present had assured Adrien that  _ something  _ was happening between the two, but he had not asked — and then Kim had mentioned that Max would to tag along because of some gaming competition in the States he had qualified for.

The second thing that had made this conversation memorable had been this: Kim had not been fully sold to the idea of being an akuma again. He had not explicitly said it, but Adrien had spoken with too many akuma victims to miss the small hints they gave. And as the athlete had  _ said  _ “the trouble with trouble is that it usually sounds like a good idea at first”, Adrien was willed to read this as a part of Kim changing his mind after accepting the deal.

This was what had surprised both Chat Noir and Ladybug.

The idea of someone rejecting Hawkmoth was not new — they had wondered what he would do if someone would not agree to his deal for a while now — but that someone might get second thoughts  _ after  _ being akumatised had never struck them. So far, most akuma had been led by instinct, had aimed to get revenge and whoever had wronged them. A few had had more agenda than this and to obtain the Miraculouses for Hawkmoth, but the basic gist was that akuma were ruled by their emotions and instincts, and that they did not tend to conduct plans before they acted.

(Reflekta had been an exception to that general rule as she had managed to catch on to Marinette’s plan and to take measures against it.)

But for Kim to be able to change his mind and not to give his best after the butterfly had tainted him — it had been just as confusing as it had been fascinating for Marinette and Adrien. They had asked Master Fu about it, but all the guardian had been able to say was that it was a double-edged blade for Hawkmoth to pull a lot of the akumatised person’s traits into the akuma. On one hand, it made them stronger, but on the other hand, it kept them closer connected to the person they usually were.

(If this would prove to be true, Adrien would buy everyone involved their favourite food to celebrate, because he had hoped for a weakness that was not just ‘Hawkmoth can only control one akuma at a time’ for so long.)

Finally folding the schedule he had received from Natalie and hiding it in the pocket Marinette had sewed into his fencing bag, Adrien straightened up and rolled his shoulders. “Sorry, Plagg,” he said as he turned around. “We need to go.”

There was no reply. Not a single complaint, not exaggerated snoring as the cat feigned sleep to get out of patrol. It was too quiet, had been too quiet for a while now that Adrien thought about it. Usually, Plagg started to do something to do something that made his Chosen pay attention to him when he started to feel bored — and he must have been bored for a while now.

“Plagg?” Adrien asked quietly, looking around  the room. His kwami was nowhere in sight. There were empty camembert packages on the desk, on the nightstand — practically everywhere, but the little black cat was not to be seen. The blond boy groaned, running both hands through his hair. “C’mon, we don’t have time to play hide and seek now,” he sighed as he moved towards the shelf, one of the many places where the kwami liked to hide when he did not want to be seen.

It would not the first time that Plagg was hiding somewhere to avoid responsibilities, although it had gotten much better lately. It would also not be the first time that the kwami had eaten too much cheese and was now sleeping somewhere because it always made him tired when he ate too much.

Adrien groaned, again, as he started to open the drawers of the desk, making a face at the  _ mess  _ his partner had made there. Checking his watch as he moved onto his other drawers, he decided that if he would not manage to find  Plagg within the next ten minutes, he would text Marinette and ask her if they could swap patrol days  _ just once _ . And then, he would ask Tikki to have words with her counterpart. It had never been said, but he had a growing suspicion that the gentle but strict ladybug kwami had influence on Plagg and would surely be able to whip him in shape.

Too focused on turning the pillows of his bed around, hissing Plagg’s name and growing increasingly annoyed with the kwami, Adrien did not hear how the door opened and someone stepped into his room, but his Chat Noir instincts worked, if dulled, even when he was not transformed and he knew that someone was there, felt the presence of another like the other person.

“I suppose you’re looking for him, son?”

Dread crawled up Adrien’s spine and he  _ trembled  _ as he turned around to face his father, fists clenching at his sides. He knew before he dared to look, because this was far too close to his recurring nightmares, the nightmares that had grown increasingly terrifying ever since he had grown suspicious of his father. And sure enough, Gabriel Agreste was standing in the door, dressed into his usual, immaculate suit and Plagg firmly in his hand. In fact, this was worse than in his nightmares, because it was real.

He would not wake up from this in a few minutes, sweat-drenched but relieved to find his room empty and Plagg snoring somewhere. This was not a worst case scenario his brain had cooked up in the dead hours of the day. This was a worst case scenario his bad luck had transferred from his nightmares straight into his waking hours.

“You…”

He could not even say it. The words got stuck in his throat, made him choke on a truth that was awful and could impossibly be denied. His father  _ who might be the man chasing after his Miraculous  _ had caught Plagg. Probably because the kwami had wanted to sneak into the kitchen for more camembert, but this did not really matter right now as it failed to make anything better. It did not make a difference that it probably been Plagg’s gluttonous stomach what had landed them in this mess. The result was the same: he was in acute danger, and for the first time since Chronogirl, he was truly terrified.

Of the same man who had once taught him how to play the piano, laughing when a six-year-old Adrien had insisted on playing for his mother right away, repeating the same few chords over and over because it had been all he had known at the time. Of the same man who had once gotten an allergic reaction when he had tried to pick wildflowers with the rest of his family, insisting that he was  _ perfectly fine  _ as he had been sneezing and teary-eyed. But that had been before Christine Agreste had disappeared and her husband had followed her while still being present. The man who had been there for his son, who had made time for him in his busy schedule had not been around for a long time and had been replaced by someone who probably did no longer know how to care for someone.

Instead of speaking, Adrien simply stared at his father. 

The man was still standing in the doorway, tall and imposing, sharp grey eyes glinting behind his glasses. There was nothing soft about him — he looked like a tower made of steel that was reaching high into the skies. Compared to the man Adrien had known once, before his mother had vanished, a man who had hardly been without flaws but who had cared, this man was a statue — a dangerous statue.

So this was how it ended — the time of uneasy suspicion, the time of longing for the truth and dreading it in equal measures. He was standing in the middle of his room, fists clenched to fists and acid churning in his stomach. Inside of him, everything was  _ aching  _ and screaming at him to  _ run _ , but how could he? Between him and the exit stood the man he had running from just like he had once run towards. 

“I know,” the man said slowly.

Adrien’s world shattered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> goodbye.


	9. how am i gonna be an optimist about this? — bastille, pompeii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maybe someone will catch on that i have been putting one twist out there since chapter 2~~~~

There was a knock on the trapdoor and Marinette frowned as she got up from the floor where she had been pinning cloth to the pattern. As far as she knew, no one had planned on visiting her that day, especially after she had mentioned that she wanted to work on a new dress (warmer and more comfortable) for the winter in the group chat for the people from their collège class — including Chloe and Sabrina — Nino had started the other day. The official reasoning had been that they had been all scattered over lycees all over the arrondissement (and Nino himself was living on the other side of town), but even then Marinette had suspected that it would turn into a place to swap gossip.

At this point, she was nearly entirely sure that she was caught up on all the talk and the rumours that involved her former and current classmates at the moment, and she was not sure how she was supposed to feel about the news that Alix had gained the tooth fairy nickname after knocking some guy’s teeth out when he had grabbed her without having been allowed to, but — it was fun to be in contact with the people she had known for so long again. And it was even better to realise that they had all changed, grown up.

But although it had been neither planned nor announced, Marinette was not  _ too  _ surprised to see her best friend dragging her boyfriend into the room. After being friends with Alya for three years, some things were predictable.

“So,” Alya started as she sat down on Marinette’s desk chair, her eyes flickering over to Nino who was standing in the doorway, watching the unfolding scene with a trace of nervousness in his eyes. “What’s going on, Marinette?” she asked with a grin.

“This is the interrogation about my man Adrien, just in case you didn’t guess it already,” the DJ added as he sat down on the chaiselongue, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself as he adjusted his cap.

Marinette sighed although she had prepared herself for the inevitable questions from her best friend, questions that had been asked for the first time when she had called Alya to tell her. But even then, she had known that there would be more questions. “It was kinda obvious,” she said with another sigh, sitting down next to Nino. “Fire away?”

“Giving her a blank cheque? That’s dangerous,” Nino said with a dramatic sigh as he looked at his girlfriend. “ _ Truly  _ dangerous.”

Marinette knew, but that did not mean that she would hide from this. Hiding information from Alya was near impossible anyway and she reserved her surprising proficiency at it for the Ladybug secret. If Alya knew all her other secrets, that was fine. But the Ladybug secret was one that could easily be dangerous for the blogger. Keeping it from Alya meant to keep her safe, even at the risk that she would be angry once she found out.

“Oh shush, I’m not that bad, Spielberg,” the other girl huffed before she wheeled the chair towards the chaiselongue. “But I —  _ we _ want all the details.”

“Do  _ we _ ?” the DJ muttered, but he grinned as he leaned backwards to look at the both girls, chuckling softly when his girlfriend threw him an offended glare. “Alright, alright, Alya, I’m pretty curious too,” he conceded quickly.

“We, uh, kinda met for coffee after his fencing practice,” Marinette muttered hastily, feeling nervousness grow in her cheeks — either because she was bending the truth without knowing what Adrien had told Nino already or because hidden under her blankets, Tikki was moving around for some reason. “And, um, we talked about — stuff,” she continued, nearly snorting because ‘stuff’ had been ‘important things that were relevant to our secret lives, no big deal’.

“We’re actually confused about one thing,” the blogger slowly said after exchanging a quick glance with the DJ before she leaned forward, reaching for Marinette’s hands with a near  _ conspiratorial  _ smile one on face.

“See, my bro Adrien says you asked him out, but Alya tells me that he asked you,” Nino said with a theatrical sigh before he lowered his voice. “We may have had a bet,” he whispered.

This, too, failed to surprise Marinette, because she knew the kind of people she was friends with. There was an active betting pool, ran by Max, among her acquaintances for all kinds of bets, ranging from  _ ‘will Juleka ask Rose to the dance?’ _ (Alix’ wildcard bet that no, Rose would ask Juleka had paid off handsomely), over  _ ‘what kind of dare would Kim suggest next?’ _ (Sabrina had won when she had predicted that it would be armwrestling and Marinette had won as well  when she had bet on Adrien in that contest) up to  _ ‘would Nathanael’s art win the first or the second place in the contest?’ _ (a bet won by Nino who had grinned as he had collected his winnings).

To be completely honest: she would have been shocked if there had been no bets at all involving Adrien and her. And under different circumstances, she would have pretended to be offended, but both Alya and Nino knew that she had some money on the inevitable event that Kim would dare Alix to go on a date with him, and she was not going to become a hypocrite over something like this.

“I guess … you’re both right?” she retorted, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger as she bit her lip. “We kinda … asked each other out.”

“...damn,” Nino muttered as he sighed deeply and shook his head, his eyes searching and finding Alya’s. “Suppose that means it’s a tie?” he asked.

“Maybe use the money on a date?” Marinette suggested with a shaky grin, eyes flickering over to Tikki again, dread and worry growing inside her stomach. This was the first time that her kwami was acting like this, the first time Tikki did not pretend to be some kind of doll when someone was visiting who was not Adrien. It was something she would have to investigate, even if this meant that she would have to ask her friends to leave. “It’s not like I want you to leave but … I was working on something and, um, I still need to read my essay a second time to check for errors,” she lied smoothly, brushing back her hair.

“You work too much, girl,” Alya said with a frown before her eyes lit up when her gaze lingered on the half-pinned dress on the floor. “Or is that a dress for the date with  _ Adrien _ ?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

“It  _ definitely _ is,” Nino nodded solemnly as he jumped up in a fluid move, holding his hand out to the blogger and pulling her to her feet. “We should really get going … we didn’t warn you, Marinette, but … uh … good luck with the dress?” he muttered with a frown.

“Thank you,” she said as she smiled at the duo. “Um, I’ll see you on Saturday, I guess? And … I’ll text you pictures of the dress when I’m done, Alya,” she added as an afterthought, forcing herself to act as normal as possible, even though she wanted to rush over to her kwami and ask Tikki had was happening that had unsettled her, but this question would have to wait for a bit longer, until she had properly said goodbye to her friends, after she had made sure that they would not take offense on any of this — because the last thing she wanted was to fight with her friends.

* * *

 

“I know.”

Never had two short words made Adrien feel as lost, as hopeless. After the somewhat disastrous incident when he had learned of Lady—, no, Marinette’s identity and had revealed his own, he had doubted that anything would ever leave him with as much ice in his veins, but it seemed like his father had chosen to prove him wrong. Because right now, Adrien did not feel like he could breathe, not with the way his lungs hurt. And while the reveal of their identities had ultimately led towards something  _ good,  _ Adrien was certain that, unlucky as he was, this identity reveal would hardly go as smoothly.

For all he knew, his father would ask him to join forces with him. And even if Adrien was not Chat Noir, he would reject this offer — working with the man who held an entire city hostage was nowhere on his priority list. Betraying his  _ girlfriend _ , his partner was also nothing he was inclined to do anytime soon.

He was unblinkingly staring at his father, trying in vain to read the man’s blank expression. “You know,” Adrien echoed, his eyes flickering over to Plagg who was still squirming in Gabriel’s grasp, trying to fight his way out. God, this was a disaster that made the accidental reveal look like a walk in the park in comparison. Not only had he gotten caught, he had also gotten caught by the man who might or might not be Hawkmoth. And Plagg was across the room, trapped in the hand of a man who did not seem to have any designs on letting him go. Hah, at least the puns still worked, even when the situation was fraught. 

In any case: there was no chance to transform and to escape as Chat Noir. The only option was to fight as Adrien and — he did not like his odds for that. Because while he could not transform, his father had an ace up his sleeve; his kwami’s presence and the ability to use Nooroo to transform into Hawkmoth.

“I do,” the man repeated drily, scoffing at the way the kwami had started to bite his hands to free itself. “Kwami, stop biting me.”

Plagg, bless his soul, did not seem to care about the man’s strict tone as he kept biting and clawing, hissing curses at the man. “Don’t care ‘bout you being some big shot designer, I can still kick your ass,” he snapped as he sunk his teeth into the man’s thumb, causing him to flinch and sigh deeply, remaining more than just vaguely unimpressed.

“Ladybug knows where I am,” Adrien choked out as he raised his fists, his eyes flickering all over the room before he looked back at his father. If the man wanted the Miraculous, he would have to take it by force because Adrien would never hand it over. He was bluffing, of course. He had not seen neither Marinette nor her masked alter ego all day because they were avoiding each other as much as that was possible without causing people to wonder, but there was no way the man would know.

“Does she now?” the designer asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.

“She always does — we’re partners,” Adrien replied sharply, wondering what would happen if he would simply charge and try to free Plagg himself. He would have the element of surprise on his side, and his father was not transformed right now.

“That’s odd — I could’ve sworn today was Monday and you’re supposed to be on your solo patrol,” the older man stated, amusement still etched deeply into his voice. The worst part was that he was right. Adrien was not supposed to be at home, he was supposed halfway across down, somewhere around the Arc de Triomphe right now. 

So even if Marinette would somehow know that something was wrong — maybe if her kwami picked up on Plagg’s distress — that would be where she would start looking for him. Unless Tikki would be able to pinpoint where exactly her less lucky partner was right now. Adrien did not know, but he wished that he would have asked about this when he had had the time to ask.

“You enjoy this far too much, old man,” Plagg scoffed as he tried to bite the designer again, and Adrien felt a rush of fondness for the kwami. “Just use poor Nooroo to transform so we can get this show on the road — or are you too much of a coward to face us directly?” he spat out, venom dripping from his every word.

Gabriel gasped, a flash of what — betrayal? annoyance? more amusement? crossing his face as he looked down at Plagg. For a moment, the silence was perfect, so perfect that Adrien could  _ hear  _ how the muscles that kept his companion restrained in his father’s hands loosened, allowing the kwami to finally free himself and flit towards Adrien.

_ “Nooroo?”  _ He repeated slowly, his eyes not leaving the duo on the other side of the room but it seemed like his thoughts were, once more, far away from his own son. “You mean the butterfly kwami?”

“Or some kid with a really unfortunate name,” Plagg snorted disdainfully as he curled up against his Chosen’s neck, his small body tenser than usually because much like Adrien, he was mentally preparing himself to fight against the man. 

He was aching to fight, Adrien could tell. There were green sparks radiating from the ring, as if the transformation had already begun, and for the first time since they met, there was no yawned ‘do we have to?’ or a soul deep sigh of fatigue in regards to the transformation; right now, Plagg  _ wanted  _ to fight, craved it even. Right now, Adrien was the one who was — waiting. He was not sure what he was waiting for, maybe an explanation from his father, but he wanted to hear the man confirm his suspicions.

“Nooroo is Hawkmoth’s kwami, not mine,” the designer said drily as in his pocket, someone started to  _ giggle _ . 

Adrien stared at his father perplexedly, his jaw dropping slowly. It dropped even more when a  _ flash  _ of blue and green burst from the man’s pocket, moving too quickly to be recognisable for until it sat down on the designer’s shoulder.

“Shazuu.” Plagg sounded tired,  **defeated** as his body lost all tension and the ring stopped to spark. “You’re truly an  _ asshole  _ sometimes, birdbrain.”

“Language, black cat,” the peacock said haughtily, but there was a trace of amusement in his voice. It was a rather  _ Alya _ behaviourism and the thought gave Adrien the sting he had needed to snap out of it, although it reminded him of something else, too, something he had tried to force out of his head because he connected it to the history lesson from hell.  _ “The only names that haven’t changed in years are the turtle dude and Paupulo — the one with the kinda … Peacock themed design,”  _ Nino had said, seemingly ages ago. 

“He may have a point, Shazuu,” the designer conceded quietly, a rare warmth softening his features as he spoke. “I certainly took this … too far. I believe I owe you an apology, Adrien.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m more a one kwami kinda guy. And peacocks are more fashionable than butterflies. — Gabriel Agreste, backstage, throughout this story
> 
>  
> 
> Also: the initial conversation between Plagg and Shazuu were the first lines I had written for this story


	10. ‘cause though the truth may vary. —  of monsters and men, little talks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the working title for this was 'Agreste angst. angstreste?'
> 
> also, get ready for the throwback to chapter 1
> 
> ~~surprising fact: shoulder aches and writing do not mix well~~

Inside his chest, Adrien’s heart was racing as he stared at his father, at the man who had just  _ apologised _ . All of this was going very much not the way he had expected it to — which was both wonderful, because he would not have to fight his father, and not-so-wonderful as he was entirely out of his element right now.

“I’ve known that just like I knew you are Chat Noir for … a while now,” the designer said, his fingers toying with the plain silver bracelet around his left wrist. “The ring … the … uh … showers during akuma attacks,” he added as he looked up, throwing Adrien a glance that seemed to say  _ that was hardly brilliant _ before he continued. “And Shazuu saw … Plagg.”

_ “Tattletale,”  _ the cat kwami hissed into the direction of the other. “You’re supposed to be on my team.”

Shazuu smiled before he shrugged, arranging his feathered tail as he kept lounging on the man’s shoulder. “You were sneaking around in my partner’s office, cat,” he said drily as he rolled his eyes. “I figured I should tell him.”

“It was helpful for me,” the designer said as he ran a hand through his hair, hair that was not looking as immaculate as it usually would. “To set the stage, if you’d like.”

“You went and placed evidence to essentially frame yourself,” Shazuu muttered with a grim expression before he rolled his eyes, evidently not convinced that this had been the wisest course of action. In fact, this was a sentiment Adrien shared, because he had spent a year on an investigation that had been proven moments ago to have been entirely useless, because the man he had suspected could have cleared himself  _ instantly. _

“And rather than to tell you that … that I’m Paupulo, I left you with the suspicion that I was Hawkmoth because it kept you from realising the truth, from digging up things I’d prefer to remain hidden,” his father said with a shrug, the usual exterior of the man who was always in control crumbling for a moment and allowing Adrien a glimpse on a man who had once been a guide, someone who had always had a plan, an ace up his sleeve. “I tried…” Gabriel added, trailing off for a moment as he looked from his kwami to Plagg to Adrien. “I tried to let you be the kind of hero this city deserves by just letting you  _ be  _ … rather than to confront you about it. I … I …  _ have _ faith in you.”

“So you had the Gorilla reassigned because I didn’t need a bodyguard as Chat Noir?” Adrien asked slowly, still not quite trusting his voice. For years, he had questioned what it would take for his father to show approval as neither fencing trophies nor perfect grades seemed to do the trick. And now, he was not sure whether he could forgive the man, even though it seemed like they had been on the same side of this all along.

“That, yes, and I spent more than thirty years transforming regularly … I remember taking unnecessary risks to transform unseen,” his father replied calmly, his fingers curling around his bracelet. 

Adrien stared at him, his jaw clenched as he tried to understand this, only to find himself filled with a distinct lack of genuine surprise when he did. A long time ago, he had told himself that his father just wanted to keep him safe when the man had been particularly strict about something to lessen the sting whenever he was kept from doing what the other children did. Over the years, it had turned into a mantra he had repeated over and over, because it had been the only way he could still believe it.

“I’m sorry for not talking to you about this earlier,” the man added after a moment.

“I guess you had a hand in keeping Plagg out of  _ that  _ room, Shazuu?” Adrien asked quietly, focusing on the facts for now, not on their interpretation. He was too confused right now; he would need distance to analyse these contradicting emotions (solace, anger, disappointment, relief) and so he would delay facing his inner turmoil when he could see the whole picture rather than simply a multitude of fragments that did not tell the whole story. And the room that had been locked was an important fragment.

“We keep things in the room that need to be treated with caution,” the designer said with a shrug. “So we took precautions to keep even kwami out.”

“We should show them,” his kwami said slowly. “Just so a certain black cat knows why I’ve tried so hard to keep him out.”

Said black cat scowled and hissed at the peacock but did not comment. Shazuu had a point; Plagg tended to take interest in the things that he should better have stayed away from. In addition to the bad luck that surrounded him, the kwami had a penchant for causing trouble  _ on purpose  _ and that typically warranted warnings. A lot of warnings.

“I suppose you know the way but … follow me,” Adrien’s father sighed as he stepped out of the room, moving down the hallway with quick, determined steps as Shazuu abandoned his place on his partner’s shoulder, rather hiding in the pocket again — just in case they met one of the employees. And although the mansion was large, large enough to get lost in, according to his friends, they reached their destination fast. “Careful … and you might want to stay away from the shelves, Plagg,” the man said grimly as he unlocked the door and pushed it open, revealing a sight that made the younger Agreste gasp, because — he had not expected this.

The room was filled with glasses on shelves, and each glass was neatly labelled with a date and a location. There was not much light, but it was not the dimness of the room that made Adrien trade carefully as he stepped towards the room. It was the feeling of  _ pure evil  _ that was coming from the jars, the sound of butterfly wings tapping against the glass. Akuma. Each glass was filled with akuma; some were sharing it with the broken object they had possessed, once, but most glasses only contained a single dark butterfly.

“...how … how long have you been … collecting them?” Adrien asked, moving back towards the door. Even if he was not Chat Noir and hence prone to being hunted by bad luck, being exposed to so many akuma for a longer period would affect everyone, would creep through anyone’s skin and settle in their bones.

“When there is a Ladybug, they purify the butterflies,” his father replied, reaching out and pushing the neatly written label ( Rio De Janeiro, 15th of April, 2009 ) back against the glass before he shook his head. “When there isn’t or I am not in contact with them, I store them,” he finished with a shrug. “You get used to it.”

Adrien shuddered, chills running down his spine. There were many things he could imagine getting used to (for example that he had spent more than a year investigating his father only to learn that the man was  _ not  _ Hawkmoth), but he could not imagine ever getting used to the eerie feeling of pure darkness that radiated from the jars.

“He has been collecting them for at least thirteen years,” Plagg said flatly, squirming in the pocket of Adrien’s shirt. “Tikki’s last Chosen never met Paupulo, after all,” he added drily, throwing another glare at Shazuu, who remained as unimpressed as he had been before.

“We should get out of here,” the bird kwami said instead, his voice quiet but firm, as he floated away from his Chosen and out of the room, hurrying to get away from the countless butterflies. Adrien followed quickly, all too happy to get away from the darkness before it could sink into his bones.

“We should,” Plagg agreed, his eyes flickering over to the glasses again before he turned away. “But seriously … you should do something about these butterflies.”

“The only one capable of dealing with akuma is Ladybug,” the designer said grimly as he closed the door and locked it carefully before he returned to key to his necklace. “Which is why I’d like for her to take this on soon.”

“You know that’s not really true,” his kwami chided, brown eyes narrowed in disapproval as he tapped his foot against his partner’s shoulder. “Sikhaa…”

“...has been missing for a good millennium now,” Plagg said sourly as he grimaced. “And she hates it. So it’s gonna be Tikki’s Chosen who gets to collect some hours.”

“The firefly,” Gabriel supplied absentmindedly as he grimaced as well, shaking his head. “She … belongs to another set of Miraculouses, but like he said: she is missing.”

“She isn’t the only one who disappeared,” Adrien said softly, his hands clenching to fists at his sides. “ _ Maman… _ ”

His father’s shoulders tensed and the man marched down the hallway in silence before he pushed open the door to his office and sighed deeply. “What happened with your mother,” Gabriel Agreste said softly, even as his hands wrapped themselves tightly around the edges of his desk, “happened because I chose family over duty.”

It was nothing Adrien would ever have imagined to hear from his father — because Gabriel Agreste’s middle name was not Étienne but  _ responsible and dedicated to his duties _ . At the same time, the blond boy was convinced that nothing the man could say now would still shake him, even  if they were closing in on a topic that had not been discussed in their household in the past few years: how Christine Agreste had vanished without a trace.

“You were … sick when your mother … disappeared, do you remember this?” his father asked softly, his gaze flickering over to the silver-framed picture of his wife that he had kept on his desk ever since Christine Agreste had vanished. “She stayed with you … took care of you … but … you know … she never liked being stuck indoors.”

Adrien remembered this, remembered that this had been why they had spent so many weekends out of town, on the meadows and fields that belonged to their house on the countryside (the house he had not seen since his mother had vanished). He also remembered how some of his father’s rich acquaintances had whispered about all the important social events the Agrestes were missing because of these trips.

“She … loved you … so she stayed with you,” the older Agreste continued weakly, his fingertips brushing daintily over the silver frame, “but I wanted to give her a — break. So …  I took the afternoon off and arranged for her to have some time to herself out of town while I stayed with you.”

Adrien did not reply. He did not know what to say, his heart torn in two. When his mother had disappeared, everyone had noticed how his father had changed. Not only had Gabriel started to push his son towards the  _ appropriate _ hobbies, but the mansion had gotten emptier, the man’s designs had grown more somber. Adrien had always attributed this to the grief, but now he realised that it had been guilt, too. Guilt because in trying to do the right thing, he had made a mistake.

It did not excuse the years that had passed since, six long years of questioning  _ why  _ his father could not even look at him, six years of  _ walls  _ that had seemed to surround the man when Adrien had needed him most. But while it failed to excuse it, it added an angle that Adrien had not seen before, an angle that explained parts of it. Whether this understanding would actually make a difference, however, was left to be seen.

“The Hawkmoth then — his name was Saturnia—” his father continued before he fell silent, looking down at his partner and companion who was perched on his shoulder.

“Depending on how you read it, that word translates into Night Peacock’s Eye in German,” Shazuu supplied with a hollow chuckle.

“—didn’t like me very much,” the designer said with a wince, his fingers leaving the frame of the picture and brushing over his kwami’s feathered head instead. “He figured out my civilian identity so I had this place turned into a fortress…” he trailed off a moment as a he looked around but caught himself again quickly. “But as long as I had Shazuu and more experience, his attempts on — getting me out of the picture were fruitless,” he continued, getting back on track and rushing through the next words that fell from his lips like a waterfall, as if he had held them in for too long. “So he wanted to … kill Shazuu.”

“Kwami are immortal,” Plagg threw in, his forehead still forming a frown as he looked at the others with narrowed eyes. “As in: can’t be killed.”

“Saturnia created an akuma with the ability to — ‘misplace’ people in time and space,” the other kwami replied slowly, his head pressed against his partner’s cheek. “If Paupulo had been misplaced, the universe would have restored its balance … and that would have ended badly. You and Tikki got lucky when you fought Chronogirl,” he added quietly.

“We knew about the akuma,” Gabriel said somberly as he looked at his son, not even trying to avoid his eyes and rather squaring his shoulders as he faced Adrien. “I had promised your mother to look after you, so Melissa … the Chosen of the bee kwami … went on her own, calling in Ragina, the fox, and the past Chat Noir on her way … the Ladybug then was located in India,” he finished, trailing off.

“I remember that,” Plagg said with a wince, his entire body shuddering as he leaned against Adrien’s neck. “It was … horribly wrong. Ajit, my Chosen, and Pyarr’s Chosen nearly died. The fox was less lucky,” he added, his voice somber as he shook his head.

Marinette was right, Adrien realised. To hear about the fallen Miraculous holders was like standing at an open grave, and if he had not known how dangerous it could be since Alya and Nino had dug up these  _ tragedies _ , he would have trembled. At the same time, there was relief flooding his veins because the Chat Noir before him had  _ survived _ .

“The akuma went for my car, the car your mother was in,” Gabriel said, his face paler than usual. “She was … moved away from this timeline. Melissa called me before she engaged the Akuma … so I left you … and went to fix what … what I had done wrong.”

“It was too late, wasn’t it?” Plagg asked drily as Adrien felt like he could no longer breathe. His memories of the day when his mother had disappeared without a trace had always been near dreamlike, had never made sense to him. He had thought that it had been the grief that had blurred them, but if he had been sick, that made sense as well.

“Saturnia was beaten, but the Butterfly kwami disappeared … and without Ladybug, the akuma’s actions could not be undone … so your mother remains lost to this day,” the designer whispered weakly. “We …  _ I _ failed … and all I could do was to retrieve the Fox Miraculous and return it to the guardian.”

“Pyarr’s Chosen was devastated and gave us her Miraculous as well,” Shazuu added quietly, his eyes filled with something Adrien could not quite place. It was sadness, yes, but it was also guilt and something else. “It was a bad day for everyone involved.”

“Yes,” the designer said as tiredly he sat down in his chair and folded his hands atop of the desk, his shoulders slumping. “It really was.”

Adrien had heard enough for one day. He needed time to rearranged his perspective on his father, and this was impossible as long as they were in the same room. He nodded slowly, turning towards the door and walking away, the way his father had so many times. “Plagg,” he said as he closed the door to the room behind him. “Claws out.”

“Patrol, I know,” Plagg nodded before he  _ hurried  _ into the ring for once, replacing Adrien with Chat Noir. It was a blessing, because even though Plagg would undoubtedly return to his usual grumpy ways before long, the current behaviour of the kwami was something that felt a lot of  _ caring  _ to the blond boy, and so he smiled faintly as he jumped out of his bedroom window.

Getting out of the mansion and racing across town, the wind in his hair and fresh air in his lungs, Adrien felt how his problems were shrinking behind him. Being Chat Noir often had this particular effect, because as long as he was not Adrien, he did not feel tied to the life he led when he was a civilian. And especially now as his civilian life started to bleed into his existence as Chat Noir, he felt like he had to run until his head was empty. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a flash of red, but he did not slow down to let her catch up until he reached one of the roofs they tended to end up on when they patrolled together and there had been no incident. Behind him, Marinette’s feet made no sound as she landed on the roof, and he finally turned to face her. In the moonlight, she was pale, but her presence alone was enough to calm his troubled mind.

“You’re fine, thank god, Tikki picked up on Plagg’s — distress earlier,” she said softly as she sat down next to him. For a moment, their eyes met and even in the dim light, he saw a million unasked questions in her glance, but then she fell silent, staring out at the city. She was giving him space and time, she would wait until he would speak, he realised, and while she was Ladybug right now, it was a rather Marinette thing to do.

The scene reminded him of the evening when he had first told her that he suspected his father to be Hawkmoth, and although it seemed like that evening had been a million years ago, he did not feel much better than he had then as he cleared his throat. “He … my father … he isn’t Hawkmoth,” he whispered, feeling how something inside his chest  _ burst  _ and relief flooded his system.

Marinette’s squared shoulders lost their tension and she exhaled audibly. “Oh, thank god,” she whispered as she turned towards him. “I was worried — not because you’d turn on me or anything but…” she trailed off, her left hand resting on his shoulder.

He leaned into her touch, his forehead resting against hers. “I know,” he whispered.

And he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ragina was a past holder of the Fox miraculous but rather than to take his name from the Latin root (Vulpes → Volpina), the user derived his alias from another source; the result being the proto-germanic word for ‘decision, advice, counsel’. The chain of derivation being as follows renard (fox in French) → Reynard (English, name for the red fox in European folklore) → Ragina (+ harduz (strong, powerful))


	11. come as you are,  as you  were, as i want you to be — nirvana, come as you are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 11/12, we nearly made it.   
> note: the best thing about this story is that i only use two POV and that these two narrators are hella oblivious and I laugh each time they don't notice something or don't see the connection. it's the best thing.
> 
> also yes. the answer is yes.

It was Wednesday evening and the akuma was not backing down, no matter how hard Marinette fought against him. Sweat was dripping down from her face as she somersaulted to avoid a fiery arrow, and she was not sure whether the heat or the exhaustion were getting to her. What she did know was that she had to get Jagged Stone away from the entrance of the burning hotel before the man could wade into the flames to get his agent who had gotten stuck inside.

As she threw her yoyo to drag the rockstar away from the fire for the fifth time,  she allowed herself a short glance into the direction of her partner, but Chat Noir was not faring much better. He had managed to convince most civilians to stand back, but as most fire akuma, this one was going to be a piece of work.

“We need to get the last people out of there!” she yelled as she glared at the musician who was still trying to get back into the fire. On one hand, she understood the wish to save someone who mattered, but on the other hand — what would the rockstar actually  _ do  _ once he was back inside the hotel? No one knew where the last missing people were, and to just run into the fire and hope for the best would be plain reckless.

“If the Corps de Pompier doesn’t appear soon, I’m going in,” Adrien yelled back as he swirled his baton to to keep the fire away from the civilians who were still trying to get away from the akuma. “This is looking pretty awful.”

“You know what they said — there’s more fire elsewhere,” she said as she wiped sweat off her forehead. The heat had been getting to her from the beginning, and she dreaded the thought that this would only be getting worse as time passed.

“I know but … I’d rather not test how much the Lucky Charm can fix today,” he said with another glance towards the hotel.

She merely nodded as she swung across the street, out of the line of fire, while the frown on her forehead grew. Fire akuma were her least favourite opponents. Not only was the collateral damage they caused always extensive, they were also resilient and made close combat near impossible. She considered to summon a Lucky Charm, but this early into the fight and without even a vague idea what the possessed item might be, doing so would be irresponsible. Because from the moment she used her special skill onwards, there would be only five minutes left to figure out how to use the object and to defeat the akuma before she would have to recharge.

“Got room for two more?”

Marinette had never been more relieved to see the colour green as she was when she turned her head and spotted two other Miraculous holders on the roof above them. One of them was evidently Gabriel Agreste as Paupulo, dresses in a green and blue suit with a tailcoat that imitated a peacock’s trail. A feathered mask covered his face and his hands were holding a fan, and as she looked at him, she decided that on top of the roof, he looked untouchable, like the statue of a hero from days long gone. 

On his side was another spot of green. This other miraculous wielder was younger from what she could tell, and it stung for a moment when she recognised the shield on the newcomer’s back — it was the shield that was the weapon that came with the Turtle miraculous — and along with what Tikki and Plagg had let slip, this meant that the guardian had decided to pass on the legacy to someone new.

A few steps away, Adrien was staring at his father with an unreadable expression on his face before he shook it off. “We need to evacuate the seven citizens trapped inside,” he said, his eyes flickering towards the new holder of the Turtle Miraculous as he pointed towards the hotel. “And someone has to keep the akuma busy while we do that.”

“I go get the civilians,” Paupulo replied with a quick nod, jumping towards the ground as his weapon shifted into something like an grappling hook to keep him from falling too fast.

“I got the akuma, bro, no worries,” the other newcomer added with a nod as he used his shield to descent from the roof. “Uh, it’s Turtle, by the way.”

“Good call, Chat,” Marinette said calmly as she toyed with her yoyo. “Paupulo, if you get the civilians to the balcony, I can get them to safety,” she added as she looked at her partner rather than at her partner’s father. She did not owe Gabriel Agreste anything. He might be older and more experienced when it came to battling akuma than they were, but he had not fought side-by-side and back-to-back with her for the past three years. Thus, she was more concerned with Chat Noir than with Paupulo.

“Got it, Ladybug,” the holder of the Peacock Miraculous said before he  _ flew  _ towards the entrance of the hotel and disappeared in the building.

Marinette exhaled, a weird sense of relief humming in her veins. After Adrien had told her that his father was not Hawkmoth but rather the holder of the Peacock Miraculous, she had wondered what would happen if Gabriel Agreste, if Paupulo would appear during one of their fights. In fact, she had been concerned, mostly because she had not been sure how he would fit into the routine that had been established over the course of the past three years. But it seemed that the man did not have the intention to fight them on their way of dealing with akuma,that he rather fit into the plan they were coming up with.

“Where’s Master Fu?” Adrien asked as he rushed towards Turtle and the akuma, his eyes flickering over to the entrance of the hotel again and again as he kept forcing the akuma to move backwards. Marinette exhaled as she observed the exchange, relieved to see how her partner and the new holder of the Turtle Miraculous were easily finding a rhythm. After all — it had been a justified concern they had shared that the arrival of someone new would throw them off. Turtle was proving them wrong, was proving that there were niches in their teamwork others could step into to fill them.

“On the plane to Japan where he hopes to find a new holder for the Fox miraculous,” Turtle replied with a shrug as he leaped to shield Chat from the next blow. Then, he stopped and lowered his shield ever so slightly. “I’m the new guy,” he muttered.

“You’ll be great,” Marinette said drily as she threw her yoyo, let it wrap itself around both boys before she pulled, right before the akuma dropped a burning car where they had stood before. “Just … try to stay in one piece? This one is a nasty piece of work,” she added.

She was not exaggerating. They had dealt with akuma like this before, but they had never been  _ on fire _ themselves. Instead, they had set everything around them on fire, and while that had been difficult, it had never left her feeling this concerned.

“Bugaboo, the bird got something for you,” Chat said with a nearly authentic laugh, swirling his baton, as he mentioned to the balcony she had indicated before. Following his gaze, she nodded quickly before she threw her yoyo to fly over the ravaged, burning street. The fire’s scorching heat was driving beads of sweat to her forehead, but she grabbed Jagged Stone’s agent and another civilian with the same conviction that she could pull this rescue off as usual, even though the circumstances for a rescue had not been like this in a long time now.

“I got them,” Turtle said who was skilfully balancing on his hovering shield in midair as he held out his hands, and trusting him was easy for some reason. Perhaps because he was Wayzz’ new Chosen and she had met the kwami. Perhaps because Master Fu had wanted him to be his successor and she trusted the old man. Or perhaps because something about him just told her that he would not let anyone fall. She wanted it to be the last one; she wanted to trust Turtle because of himself, not because of someone he happened to know.

And it worked — the moment she let go of the two people she had grabbed to swing back, Turtle was there to grab them instead. If there was a moment when the civilians were not held by either Miraculous holder, Marinette swore that it was such a tiny moment that they did not even notice it. This was teamwork that felt all too natural, even though she knew that if it had been Adrien, if it had been Chat Noir, she would not have  _ realised  _ that she trusted him, because trusting him was as natural as breathing at this point.

“Thanks,” she said as she landed on the railing to grab the next civilian, her gaze flickering over to Paupulo who was carrying an elderly lady on his shoulder.

“Everyone else was accounted for,” he said calmly as he mentioned towards the nervous citizens. “I suggest we get them out of harm’s way as quick as possible.”

“Of course,” she said with a nod before she grabbed two teenagers who seemed to have picked a bad day to try out whether their parents’ credit cards worked at the hotel before she safely escorted them to the ground. The moment her feet touched the ground, the designer landed right behind her, placing the remaining three civilians on the ground before ushering them away.

“All civilians are safe, Chat,” she called out towards her partner who was still fighting the akuma as close as he dared to. It was not particularly close as the heat radiating from their opponent was near unbearable, but he kept him from advancing any further.

“Good job!” he yelled back, moments before Turtle appeared at his side, bringing up his shield in the very moment  _ yet another burning log  _ was headed straight for him.

Marinette exhaled. It was fascinating to watch Turtle fight alongside Chat Noir, to observe how they clicked. Turtle had Chat Noir’s back, and it not look like he had to think about it. Something about the way the Turtle moved was familiar to Marinette, but she could not quite place it, and moments later, she had a much bigger problem, because next to her, something exploded and she winced as the shock wave hit her, throwing her across the street and right into Paupulo. The collision was graceless and if not for the suits, more than just Marinette’s pride would have ended up with bruises. 

“This akuma is strong,” the designer muttered grimly as he glared at the ball of fire, his lips a thin line. “Turtle made a good call when he said we should join the … party.”

“Some water would definitely help to cool this situation,” she said with a grimace as she looked around, her eyes finding the same spot again. There was a water hydrant behind the akuma, but all her attempts to get there had been thwarted because their opponent was not just aware of his weakness, he also guarded it carefully. God, she  _ hated  _ smart akuma. “A distraction maneuver could help,” she added with a groan.

“Leave that to me,” Paupulo said with a sharp nod as he turned towards the building to his right, his eyes gleaming as he sized them up. “And maybe … have Turtle cover for you when you make the move — getting the butterfly is pointless if you can’t purify it,” he added with a frown.

Marinette thought about the room filled with akuma she had heard about, wondered how long it had been since a Ladybug had cleansed the akuma he had amassed over the years. She had made the mental note to contact him as soon as possible before, now she felt like she should tell him that she would tackle the purification of the akuma as soon as they could make an appointment for it. Knowing Tikki, she would have ways of getting into contact with the man, even after the transformation wore off.

“Sure,” she said weakly, looking over to the holder of the Turtle Miraculous.

It was calming, she decided, calming to have someone who was the proverbial shield to Chat Noir’s sword. Not just because it was another pair of eyes to watch their backs but mostly, because he was keeping Adrien safe while he kept her safe.

“What is he  _ doing _ ?” the older Agreste asked alarmed, and Marinette turned around. While Chat Noir had been shielding the last fleeing civilians before, he had decided to charge directly at the akuma now. She winced when the akuma’s foot collided with Adrien’s side, throwing him across the street. She flinched when her partner’s weapon hit the ground, metres away from him and out of his reach. By the time she realised that there were burning logs flying towards her partner, she was ready to leap and to use her yoyo to shield him, the way she had before.

“I got this,” the oldest among them announced calmly, his eyes flickering from the akuma to his son as he gripped the handle of his fan. “Allow me.”

“Wait!” Marinette called out as she took a step, but it was too late; Paupulo had used his Miraculous skill — Wheel of Fortune — by spinning his fan around his finger; only that the fan had been replaced with a rapier. A rapier he was throwing towards Adrien who frowned at the weapon for a moment before he swung it, slicing through the log that had been flung at him.

“It’s okay, LB,” Turtle said as he appeared out of nowhere next to her and grabbed her arm to lift her up and to unceremoniously move her out of the way of yet another barrage of burning wood, before he deflected the attack with his shield. “Paupulo and I aren’t on the clock,” he added with a shrug as he set her down again.

“You aren’t?” she asked with a frown as worry grew inside of her. “No five minutes rule?”

“Different rule of five,” he replied as he twisted his body around to make use of his shield.

“You’re quick on your feet,” she stated drily as she found a beam she could use to get to the water hydrant they needed.

“I dance,” he shrugged with an expression on his partly hidden face that made it impossible to say whether he was joking or not, before he held his hand out to her. “Save the yoyo for later, I can drop you off.”

Marinette blinked, once, twice. “That’d be grand, actually,” she finally said as she grabbed his hand and let him pull her onto his shield. “You’ve been training for long?”

“A year or so,” he replied with another shrug as he steered his shield over the akuma who was  _ roaring  _ with anger, before he stopped it right above the water hydrant. “You need me to cover for you while you use Lucky Charm?”

“Well, first of all, I just want water,” she said as she somersaulted off the shield and landed safely on her feet, right next to the water source. “But Lucky Charm is a solid ide— what the hell is Paupulo doing?” she snapped, interrupting herself as she watched in confusion how the man kept twirling his weapon and hissing  _ ‘Wheel of Fortune’  _ into the night, the summon accompanied by gratuitous cursing and  _ ‘goddammit, Shazuu, work with me here’ _ s.

“I think he wants his bow,” Turtle said with a sigh and elaborated. “Um, Master Fu told me — Wheel of Fortune randomly turns the fan into one of five weapons the user … pre-orders before the fight,” he explained hastily as he threw the shield and deflected a barrage of burning wood. “Paupulo uses four different swords and a bow. Right now, he wants the ranged weapon.”

“...makes sense,” Marinette said slowly, her eyes flickering towards Adrien who using his staff to keep the burning logs away from his father as the man kept trying to summon the weapon he needed right now. “Anyone,” she called out towards them, “with an idea where the possessed item might be?”

“I’m seeing it,” her partner yelled back, pointing towards  _ something _ that was faintly visible amidst the flames that surrounded the akuma. “Just, how do we get it?” he added with a frown as he looked around. “Lucky Charm?”

_ “Finally,” _ Gabriel said with a loud sigh as his fan-turned-sword turned into a bow. “If the flames were gone, I’d take a shot at the cursed object.”

“You won’t get the chance, Paupulo!” the akuma roared, the flames around him burning brighter and hotter now. However, as he focused on the man in the green and blue suit now, he seemed to forget about the water hydrant behind him.

Marinette flinched as he moved towards the man who firmly stood his ground, taking aim rather than to even try and dodge the incoming barrage. Instead, he fired five arrows in quick succession, huffing when they hit the burning logs before he dusted his suit off. “How was that?” the designer asked with a haughty scoff as he pulled another arrow from the quiver. “I got this,” he mouthed towards the teenagers before he raised his voice. “I believe you’ll find that I can take the heat,” he smirked as he looked towards the akuma.

The apple did not fall far from the tree, it seemed. For a moment, Marinette’s gaze met Adrien’s, and she raised an eyebrow at him before she chuckled and shook her head when he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“I had no interest in your Miraculous, bird, but I believe I’ll take it first,” the akuma hissed.

Behind him, Marinette rolled her eyes before she threw her yoyo up in the air. “Lucky Charm,” she called out before a hose fell from the skies. As far as Lucky Charm objects went, this was one of the most obvious ones, but she was hardly going to complain about it. Then — there was no other object she could think about that would make any sense right now, and as so often: when the akuma was specific in his powers, the Lucky Charm could not be something obscure.

“Am I ruffling feathers?” the holder of the Peacock Miraculous asked with an arrogant smirk as everyone around him groaned. Then, this was the usual reward for someone who was engaging in  _ witty  _ word play.

“I’m not  _ that  _ bad,” Adrien hissed as he looked from his father back to his partner.

“You’re worse, actually, but — sorry, M Feu, to rain on your parade,” Marinette muttered under her breath as she aimed the hose at the akuma while Turtle connected it to the water hydrant and opened it carefully, giving her the thumbsup as the water started to flow. She was grateful for the enhanced strength the suit offered her the very moment the water pressure hit, but rather than to be overwhelmed, she gritted her teeth and dug her heels into the ground as she watched how the water reached the akuma and extinguished the fire that surrounded him as he wailed.

“Excuse me for giving it my best shot,” Gabriel added drily as he pulled back the bowstring and grinned for a split second before he released it, sending the arrow on its way. With the fire and the flames gone, the akuma had lost all means of defense. The arrow hit its aim — the lighter in the akuma’s hand — and knocked it out of their opponent’s grasp and high into the air. For a moment, everyone was staring at the silver gleam against the night sky, and involuntarily, everyone took a step towards it.

Turtle’s shield flew through the air, missing it narrowly, but then, there was  Chat, a hazy silhouette as he leaped, using the shield to gain altitude. “I think it’s time we fire him,” he said with a wide grin as he caught the cursed object and tossed it towards Marinette while Turtle rolled his eyes.

“Couldn’t agree more,” Marinette sighed as she slammed her heel onto the lighter, frowning when nothing happened, when not even a scratch appeared on the metal. “Um, Turtle, could I borrow your shield for a second?” she asked, wiping a drop of sweat from her brow.

“Can I do the honours?” he asked, near cheerfully, as he lifted his shield. “It’s my first battle and, um, I haven’t done much so far.”

“You kept my partner in one piece, that counts for a lot,” she replied with a yawn as she pointed towards the lighter, “but sure.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, an excited glint in his eyes, before he slammed his shield down on the lighter, crushing it and releasing the butterfly.

“Good work, everyone,” Adrien said tiredly, rolling up the hose and carefully avoiding his father’s gaze. “But … let’s not do that again soon?”

Behind him, his father nodded slowly as he kept his bow and his unwavering gaze trained on the akuma. “Agreed, I think I’m getting too old for this,” he said somberly as Marinette caught the butterfly in the compact before she released it, cleansed from the evil Hawkmoth had transported in it. “And, Turtle, remember that you left the blogger on the roof,” he added with a raised eyebrow.

“T-the admin of the Ladyblog?” Marinette asked interestedly, returning her yoyo to her hip after watching how the cure had washed across town and fixed the damage. She was curious about this development, because for the past three years, she had often worried about Alya during akuma fights, especially during the dangerous ones. She had tried to talk about it with her friend, but the other girl had let it slip that she was following the tradition of war correspondents, and this meant that the risks that came with being in the front rows was something she was willed to face.

“Turtle said that keeping her safe worked best if we put her on a roof,” Paupulo shrugged before he finally lowered his bow.

“It was a good idea, dude,” the holder of the Turtle Miraculous replied as he jumped onto his shield. “But yeah, I’m gonna go get her back to solid ground. See you around.”

Marinette waved at him before she flung her yoyo at a building, turning towards the both Agrestes to say goodbye. “It was nice working with you, Paupulo,” she said politely, her eyes flickering over to her boyfriend. “And — I agree with you, Chat — let’s not do this again too soon,” she added softly, smiling at him.

“Thank you, Ladybug,” the designer said with a slow nod while his colourful bracelet started to glow ominously. “And I’ll give you a call about the other thing? I suppose you heard about it?” he added as he tapped his fingers against the Miraculous in a near soothing manner. “I’d discuss it now, but — I’m running out of time.”

“Sure,” she said as she heard the second beep of her own Miraculous, the first having been lost to the sound of roaring flames. “Maybe recharge on the way home?”

“Of course.” He nodded, rolling his shoulders and staring down at his weapon that was turning back into a fan. 

“I’ll take the akuma victim home,” Adrien said with a yawn as he approached the man who was still staring at his hands in terror. “See you at patrol tomorrow, bugaboo?”

“Same place as always,” she said tiredly, more reserved than usually because Paupulo was standing right next to her, before she mouthed  _ I’ll call you later _ . Then, she leaped, just when the older Agreste did the same. They landed on the same roof, and she turned towards him when he called out for her.

“Ladybug,” he said calmly, and away from the fight, it showed that he was no longer the youngest. His mask did not cover the lines on his face, and the screaming neon light from a nearby building did nothing to flatter him. At the same time, she had to begrudgingly admit that she was impressed. She could not imagine being a Miraculous holder for decades, for fighting the same battles over and over. And while Gabriel Agreste’s parenting skills were questionable at best, Paupulo was a skilled and experienced fighter, someone who had fought enough battles to fit into every team dynamic seamlessly.

“Paupulo,” she replied as she raised an eyebrow at him, her jaw clenching as she suppressed another yawn. The akuma had been strong enough to exhaust her, and she did not even want to think about what could have happened if they had not received backup.

“I wanted to thank you,” he said softly, approaching slowly. And then — his transformation wore off mid step and his eyes widened as his left foot did not meet the resistance it had expected. He staggered, fighting for balance as he hastily reached for his exhausted kwami that was drowsily flying, no,  _ falling.  _ And it was a motion the designer imitated, tumbling down the roof and towards the balcony below.

Marinette moved as if she was a puppet and her strings had just been pulled. She leaped, catching the designer mid fall and crashing into the balcony, wincing because although the suit took the brunt of it, it still hurt. Shards of shattered terracotta were trying to dig into her skin and she hissed as she struggled to get back up. “Everything okay?” she asked, wondering if this had ever happened before — that someone had gotten hurt after she had cast the cure. Then, she remembered Alya’s broken arm from a year ago and groaned.

The man who had taken the fall without a suit to protect him exhaled sharply. “Yeah … I’m getting too old for this,” the designer muttered weakly as he looked at his hand and at the red smear on it, blood that came from the wound on his head.

“Pau— M Agreste, I need you to stay awake,” she said hastily as she winced when she noticed the angle of his leg. “I’m gonna get you to the hospital.”

“You’re … running out,” he replied as her earring beeped again. “Just call … Chat or Turtle.”

“Look,” she started, wondering if her identity was worth risking his health, but someone interrupted her with the least authentic cough she had heard in awhile.

“Someone called for me?” Turtle asked as he stood on his shield, his arms crossed, his eyes flickering from her to the injured man. “No worries, LB, I got him,” he said as he jumped off the shield. “But … how about you recharge, track down Chat and we meet later?”

She inhaled deeply and held her breath for a moment before she nodded. “Alright,” she said as she looked at Paupulo before she bit her lip. “Sorry for not catching you … better,” she said weakly before she leaped away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry?


	12. but the world keeps spinning around. — kodaline, high hopes

The atmosphere in the room was heavy and somber, making it hard to breathe. 

The new guy — Turtle (‘Cooler name’s pending, du— Chat’) — was sitting in the corner of the dimly lit room. His transformation had worn off shortly after he had arrived to report that he had used his shield to rush Gabriel Agreste to the hospital under the guise of ‘a civilian who has been at the wrong place at the wrong time’. It was partly true, Marinette supposed, because Paupulo had gotten unlucky. If he had been still transformed when he had stumbled and taken the fall, he would have gotten away with barely a scratch rather than a broken leg and possibly more.

On the other side of the room, Adrien was pacing. His transformation had  _ collapsed  _ the moment she had dragged him to the empty office building after tracking him down near the former akuma’s house after she had let Tikki recharge. She had struggled to tell him what had happened to his father, but he had understood what had happened and had assured that he did not blame her, that she was not to blame for his father’s lack of caution. He had not spoken since they had arrived, however, and he had not stopped moving since.

She did not blame either boy for their way of dealing with this; they were all shaken by what had happened. She was exhausted, but she knew that the moment she would close her eyes, she would see Gabriel Agreste fall, again and again, only that in her dreams, no one would catch him. 

Neither of them was transformed anymore, but in the dimly lit room, their identities were just as safe as they had been when they had been masked. Turtle had pulled vegetables, muesli, cookies and cheese from his bag for the kwami to eat, but even Plagg had not touched the food so far. Marinette did not blame him; she was hungry but appetite was the last thing she was feeling right now.

Turtle had mentioned that the doctors suspected that the designer had a concussion on top of his broken leg, but that they had assured him that he would be safe. According to the newcomer, Gabriel had insisted that they would all stick to the same lie when he had been on his way to the hospital: that he had fallen down the stairs. It was hardly the most sophisticated lie, but this was no situation that required complex lies and a simple lie was easier to maintain.

The silence was unpleasant, clinging to them like tar. Shazuu was the only one who was talking, but it showed that it was rambling, that he was nervous. “My partner — he didn’t tell me what to do,” he muttered near hysterically as he flitted towards Tikki, towards Plagg, towards Wayzz. The other kwami were subdued, tried not to look at him, because their Chosen were fine while his had been injured.

“You  _ know  _ the protocol, Shazuu,” the turtle kwami said calmly as he moved towards the peacock, a wisp of pale green in the dim light. “His Miraculous…”

“He is not dead,” Adrien whispered softly, but Marinette had hugged him half an hour earlier when he had whispered how his father had left him with no instructions on how to proceed, no advice on how to deal with this situation.

“I’m not leaving my Chosen without talking to him. I will not reclaim the Miraculous while he’s in hospital,” the blue and green kwami snapped venomously, an aura of anger and injured pride radiating from him. It failed to surprise anyone. Peacocks were, as Marinette remembered from an excursion to the Louvre, animals that had been associated with the Greek goddess Hera in ancient days, the goddess of marriage. For Shazuu to be fiercely loyal to his Chosen was no surprise, even though Marinette could understand why Wayzz would prefer for the other kwami to change his mind.

“I hate to be responsible but … the Peacock miraculous comes with a  _ duty _ ,” Plagg muttered grimly, looking away from both Adrien and Shazuu, who threw him equally venomous glares that kept him from adding to his point.

“We don’t necessarily need a knight,” Tikki retorted sharply as she rested her hands on Shazuu’s shoulder, “not when we have a guardian.”

“Sorry,  _ petite coccinelle,  _ but I only started my training a year ago so…” Turtle trailed off, shaking his head before he shrunk back into the shadows.

“You’re doing fine, ma—  _ mate _ , don’t worry,” Wayzz assured him gently, turning away from the other kwami and nuzzling his Chosen’s cheek for a moment. Then, he looked up to face Shazuu again, his gaze softening. “My concern is … if akuma like today’s will keep appearing, we need to up our numbers,” he said as he scratched his neck. “And…”

Marinette hated that she agreed with him there even though she also agreed with Shazuu’s refusal to simply pass on his Miraculous. They were not outnumbered — Hawkmoth was the central threat, still — but they might find themselves severely outmatched, and if that happened, she would prefer to know someone behind Chat Noir and Ladybug.

“He said it himself,” Adrien whispered, his hands clenched to fists by his sides as he reached for the Peacock kwami that was retreating to the corner of the room with an indignant snort. “He’s getting old.”

“Gabriel has always come through so I’m not quitting him now,” Shazuu said harshly while no other kwami spoke, their eyes downcast and their silence heavy in the room. And for a moment, Marinette wondered how many times they had been there before, how many times one of them had refused to give up on their Chosen.

“Shazuu,  _ please _ ,” Tikki said softly, settling down on the table in front of him. 

On the table behind them, a cracking sound could be heard and three teenagers and four kwami turned towards the source of the sound, seven pairs of eyes widening as a flash of yellow burst into a room, accompanied by a light that forced them to close their eyes; it was too bright, too sudden for anything else. 

“Oh, four of us,” a soft voice said with a subtle yawn as the flash of yellow settled down near the only source of the light. It was still difficult to recognise anything, but Marinette could tell that the kwami  _ had  _ to be the bee one — Pyarr, the others had called her — because what other kwami would be yellow with black stripes?

A bit belatedly, Marinette remembered that Turtle had mentioned that Master Fu had left the Bee Miraculous in his hands,  _ just in case _ , and for some reason, it made a lot of sense that the guardian-in-training was carrying the inactive Miraculous with him rather than to leave it anywhere, something that might lead to regret with Hawkmoth on the loose. Only that from the looks of it, the Bee Miraculous was no longer inactive.

“Pyarr,” Wayzz said, surprise etched into his voice. “I didn’t think you’d wake.”

“You don’t have a Chosen, Pyarr,” Tikki added hastily but with a concerned tone in her voice, approaching the other. “You’ll exhaust yourself.”

“To appear without a Chosen is an a measure for emergencies only,” the peacock added solemnly as he joined Plagg by the side of the room, neither kwami too keen on interacting with the newcomer among them.

“Oh shush, Tikki, Shazuu, I’ll be fine,” the bee replied cheerfully as she turned towards Turtle, clapping her tiny hands as she twirled towards him. “So, you’re the new guardian?” she asked as she poked the newcomer’s nose. “You’re so  _ young. _ ”

“Pyarr,” Plagg warned sharply before the hooded boy could reply. The black cat straightened up, acknowledging the presence of the bee for the time. “Less buzzing around, more telling why you woke up,” he ordered grumpily.

For a moment, the air seemed to sizzle as the kwami exchanged glares, but then the bee sighed and turned away. “I felt … distress,” she replied calmly as she settled down on top of Turtle’s head, pulling and pushing on the Chosen’s hood until she was comfortable. “And — I’m willed to pick someone,” she added as an afterthought.

Marinette flinched, crossing her arm over her chest. “Is it that obvious that we’re out of answers?” she asked hesitantly, biting her lip until she tasted blood. The situation was fraught and they had certainly  _ not won _ , but she did not think that they had lost either. If anything, they needed to take a breath and calm their nerves before the next akuma battle so that the mess they were in now would not affect them later.

“I don’t get a clear view on what happened, I just picked up on your distress,” Pyarr said softly, her voice reminding Marinette of the kindness and the warmth that could often be found in Tikki’s voice. “So what are the details?”

“Gabriel got hurt,” Wayzz said flatly but not rudely, spinning in circles around the bee as the other kwami still sat on Turtle’s head. There was tension between them, as if they did not fully trust each other, but at the same time, there certainly was respect involved.

“Gabriel? —oh, you mean Paupulo?” the bee kwami asked as she turned towards Shazuu who nodded slowly. “He got … my Miraculous back when … when my Malika quit…”

Marinette winced. 

The talk about Miraculous holders who had come and gone was no easy topic, because it reminded her of how all humans were just the kwami’s partners for a part of the way, that they could not walk it together from the start to the end. It was why she had understood so well why the Chat Noir and the Ladybug who had been their immediate predecessors had passed on the mantle, long before their time had come. To build one’s life around being the holder of a Miraculous meant to miss out on many things because the Miraculous came with a duty that could not be ignored.

And yet — she did not think that she would give up her Miraculous anytime soon. For now, being Ladybug was who she wanted to be. And while the last akuma fight had not been what she had wanted it to be, she was not going to quit over this fight.

“Anyway,” Pyarr continued as she raised her voice. “I’m willed to pull my weight.”

“Always the hard working, diligent one who comes through in the end,” Tikki said gently, a smile in her voice as she settled down next to her. “Welcome back,” she added, resting her hands on the other kwami’s shoulders. “We won’t let Gabriel’s injury to be pointless.”

Shazuu was quiet for a moment, leaving his spot next to Plagg to settle down on Adrien’s shoulder. “I’ll talk to Paupulo,” he promised with a sigh. “First thing tomorrow.”

“I understand,” Adrien said, his hand reaching for Marinette’s and squeezing it gently. It was not necessary to have been his partner for the past years, but it helped to determine the cause of his well-hidden distress. He wanted his father to be safe, yes, but he did not want to be the seal on Shazuu’s decision to leave Gabriel and pick a new Chosen.

“It’ll be fine,” she said as she rested her head against his shoulder, willing as much Ladybug luck as possible to cling to him instead of her for a while, because he was the one who needed it now. “But we should get home. Not sure about you, but I got class … later today.”

“Same, actually,” Turtle groaned as he threw a tomato into the direction of his kwami who caught it with practised skill. “Have a snack, Wayzz, we gotta sneak back in before my old man gets back from his night shift,” he yawned.

Marinette chuckled for a moment as she watched how Pyarr sunk back into her Miraculous after demanding that Turtle would take her to look for Chosens soon and how the other kwami quickly recharged as well. Turtle was the first to leave after assuring them that he would be ‘one call away, bro’ and even after Chat Noir and Ladybug replaced Adrien and Marinette, Shazuu kept clinging to the blond, still chewing his granola bar.

“Even if my father decides to stop being Paupulo,” Adrien said as he picked the kwami up to tuck him into a pocket his suit (that was to say: Plagg) kindly provided. “You’ll always have the memories from when he was your friend.”

“I suppose … that’s true.”

* * *

The hospital room was smelling strongly of flowers when Adrien entered. For a moment, he stopped and stared at the bouquets and arrangements that were standing on the sides of the room. Next to the vases that were missing any of the flowers his father was allergic to, someone had stacked up Get Well cards, cards that been actually opened and read. His father was sitting upright, bandages around his head and his leg in a cast but a sketchbook was firm in his grasp.

“Adrien,” the man greeted as he twirled his pencil between his fingers, his eyes narrowing as he added another line to the dress he was designing.

“I didn’t know you were planning on doing a bridal collection,” Adrien said as he sat down on the chair, still holding onto the folders Nathalie had given him with the remark  _ ‘he wants them so he can work while he recovers’ _ . He had not wanted to see it, but when he had dropped the folders into his bag, the top one had slipped to the side and revealed the Get Well Soon card that had been taped to the second.

“It’s just one dress, not a whole collection,” his father replied with a shrug as he set the sketchbook aside and pushed his glasses up. “And it’s been at least three years since I tried my hand with a wedding dress,” he added as his face scrunched up and his gaze flickered over to the stack of discarded ideas.

“You let Shazuu go,” Adrien said quietly. He had expected it, truth be told. During the fight against the fire akuma, his father had said more than once that he was feeling like he was getting too old for this, for fighting against akuma, for saving the day.

“It’s been a long time coming,” the former Paupulo said softly, his left hand reaching for his right wrist where the bracelet had left a stripe of skin behind that looked like it had not seen the sun in a long time. “We both knew that,” he added softly, “and … this … you and the others … aren’t my generation.”

Adrien knew that this was true, knew that his father had fought with Miraculous holders closer to his age in the past, but it did not mean that he wanted to hear it. “You — you are … were a skilled fighter,” he muttered under his breath, his eyes avoiding the paler skin on his father’s wrist because it was what made it impossible to forget that the man had chosen to stop fighting after so many years.

“I know you worry about Hawkmoth,” the designer said as he pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes flickering to his bare wrists for a moment and his mouth twisted into an expression of wistfulness, “but I believe he’ll … be quiet for a bit.” His fingers tapped against the cover of the sketchbook as he continued to speak. “Yesterday … that akuma was stronger than anything he has thrown at you so far,” he sighed, a grim expression ghosting over his face. “Hawkmoth wants your Miraculouses, he doesn’t necessarily want you dead.”

“So you predict he’ll tune it down?” the model asked flatly.

“People nearly died last night,” his father replied calmly as he cleaned his glasses, “and unless I’m mistaken, I doubt that Hawkmoth views himself as a villain. He got quiet for a bit after Mlle Kubdel, didn’t he?”

“So you think Hawkmoth sees himself as a hero?” Adrien asked, his eyes widening. For the past three years, he had often wondered what kind of man would turn citizens who simply had a bad day into monsters, and he had never doubted that such a man would  _ know  _ that this kind of behaviour was villainous.

“I like to think that he believes that the end justifies the means, though I don’t have the slightest clue what could drive him,” the older man said as he tapped the end of his pencil against his sketchbook, a pensive expression on his face. “And then there’s the possibility that he wielded another Miraculous before. However, Master Fu doesn’t like that idea.”

Neither did Adrien. That Hawkmoth was a Miraculous wielder and that he essentially held a kwami hostage had been bad enough, but the idea that before the man had gotten his hands on Nooroo and the Butterfly Miraculous, he could have wielded another Miraculous did not sit well with him either.

“I understand why,” Adrien muttered slowly, his fingers brushing over Plagg’s fur, causing the kwami to mewl in his sleep. It was one thing for Nooroo and his Miraculous to have fallen into the hands of someone who had searched for the kwami everywhere to use him for evil, but to think that someone who had once been chosen by another kwami and who had cast this kwami and its powers aside to pursue the Butterfly Miraculous — that was a thought he did not even want to try to wrap his head around.

“It’s not a theory I particularly enjoy, though it makes sense,” the other said as he grimaced before he fell silent, his hands stilling as he stared down at the design he had been working on, a design that made little sense to the younger Agreste now that he thought about it.

“I got a question,” the model started hesitantly, clearing his throat and biting his lip.  “About something else.”

“Oh?” the designer asked as he raised his eyebrows.

“The wedding dress,” Adrien said as he set the folders he had received from Nathalie to the side. “Since when do you take commissions for a singular dress?”  _ And since when do you do them yourself rather than have another designer do it? _

“I could say that the challenge intrigued me, but — I lost at scrabble and the dress was what I had gambled,” his father shrugged as he turned the sketch towards Adrien, a near questioning expression on his face as he raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“Um,” Adrien started, his brows furrowing. He was not sure what he was supposed to think, but he was going to try and answer the question at least. “It looks nice, I guess? But maybe ask someone who knows more than I?” He straightened up and handed the sketchbook back before he continued. “In fact, Marinette heard about your accident and wanted to bring over some macaroons,” he added, scratching the back of his neck.

“So you weren’t … messing with me when you said you had a girlfriend?” his father asked, looking up from his sketch and pushing his glasses up.

“Why would I lie to you about having a girlfriend?” Adrien retorted with the most innocent expression he could muster, for once thanking his training that had also included acting classes. On the other hand, the opposite would have made more sense as his father had never been too supportive about his social interactions with other teenagers, especially when there had been nothing to gain from them.

The former holder of the Peacock Miraculous shrugged. “When I had your age, I had a lot of girlfriends that never existed to cover up that I fought all over town in the prettiest suit I’ve ever seen,” he said with a snort before he rolled his eyes. “ _ Sadly _ , they all broke up with me before I could introduce them to your grandparents.”

As usual, the mention of Adrien’s paternal grandparents was accompanied with a scoff. Adrien could count how many times he had met his father’s parents on his hands and from what he remembered, each of these meetings had included a fight between his father and his grandmother, the possibly only woman who could make his father lose his composure and  **yell** as they argued about  _ everything _ , ranging from the logo of the Gabriel Brand ( _ ‘tacky’ _ ) over Gabriel’s refusal to interact with the rest of his family ( _ ‘insolent and rude’ _ ) to the food ( _ ‘you should be preparing the meal for your mother yourself, Gabriel Étienne Agreste, and not have one of your — servants do it’ _ ). 

When speaking to Adrien, Madame Agreste was exceedingly polite and warm, but it had always been so jarring in comparison to the way she spoke to her son that the youngest Agreste had often wondered if she was only nice to him to further annoy his father. Suffice to say, he had not been unhappy when the visits had ceased in more recent years.

“So you don’t mind me dating Marinette?” Adrien asked carefully. It was always difficult to determine what his father  _ meant  _ with what he said, and the easiest way to know for sure was by asking, no matter how awkward that felt. However, since his father had started to actually talk to him, asking had gotten much easier.

Gabriel looked at him with a serious, near solemn expression on his face before he cleared his throat. “When I met your mother, I was in university and she was my fencing instructor … and my parents tried to fight me on my decision to, as your grandmother said, ‘court’ her,” he said softly, the usual traces of genuine love and affection seeping into his voice and into his softening gaze as he spoke of Adrien’s mother. “And given that I haven’t been a stellar parent in the past six years, I don’t believe the ice I’m standing on is steady enough to carry me, should I fight your decision … and I’ve met her … she’s a talented girl with a good work ethic. I suppose I approve,” he ended with a shrug. 

It was far more than Adrien had expected — approval had been a wish, and he had already decided that he would ignore any disapproval — and he caught himself smiling at the rare  mention of his mother. It did not happen often that his father brought her up without having been asked to, but whenever it happened, Adrien soaked up all information about the woman who had disappeared.

“Thank you,” he whispered softly, feeling how the sleeping kwami in his pocket squirmed when he shifted in his seat to reach for his phone to text Marinette that his father had not spoken against the idea of her stopping by for a visit.

“I insist that you are cautious … no Chat Noir shenanigans, no matter how tempting that can be,” his father went on, his face scrunching up as he shook his head and sighed deeply. “But I regretted using the transformation for … not-heroing.”

“That’s how— maman knew?” Adrien was not sure what to make of this, but he frowned at his father. He had never thought about this detail, had never thought this far ahead. When he had last thought about a future in which he would be married, it had been long before Plagg had appeared in his life. So he had never given whether or not a future spouse would know about him being Chat Noir any thought. Then, it made sense that his mother had known about Paupulo — because if there was one thing his father had always made very clear, it was that Christine Agreste was his wife and his best friend.

“That’s how Saturnia found out, yes, and your mother knew,” the designer replied with a shrug as he picked up his sketchbook again. “There are many more stories to tell, but not here and not now.”

It was clear that the story book had been closed, but something about the way his father had spoken made it sound like this was just  _ for now _ , that his father would tell him more about his days as Paupulo when the time was right.

“There’s another thing I wanted to talk about,” Gabriel muttered as he tapped the pencil against his chin. “I’ll be travelling as soon as I am permitted to leave this —  _ miserable _ place. In my absence, a colleague will be … creative director,” he said with a snort. “I know that I usually don’t hand over creative powers just like that, but we need a summer collectio—”

He stopped when there was a knock at the door, and after an imperious  _ come in _ , the door was opened and Marinette strolled in, carrying boxes from her parents’ bakery.

“Good afternoon,” she greeted politely as she handed the boxes over to Adrien. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything? Maman wanted me to bring over some food.”

It was interesting how the stoic designer paled at the mention of Sabine Cheng, and Adrien smirked, having his suspicions about what might cause this reaction. For example: the overly polite email he had written to Marinette’s mother.

“Marinette, hey,” Adrien said as he placed the boxes on top of the folders, reaching out to hug her quickly. It was  _ decidedly _ awkward to greet her in front of his father, but he decided not to let his stop him from leaning in and placing a gentle kiss against her forehead before he pulled another chair next to his. Other girls would have swooned at the casual use of his Chat Noir gift of coordination, but given that Marinette was Ladybug and had thus seen him pull off far more impressive stunts, he knew that this would hardly awe her.

“Mlle Dupain-Cheng, welcome,” Adrien’s father said as he nodded at her. “You heard about my — accident?”

She had not heard about it, she had been present for it, but as long as the man did not know that she was Ladybug, there was little she could do but to smile sadly and nod. “Yes, Adrien told me,” she replied, her smile never wavering.

“It’s — embarrassing,” the man grumbled as he scratched his bandaged forehead. “I was lucky enough to avoid a concussion.”

“I’m happy to hear this,” Marinette replied as her shoulders lost some tension. “I hope you like macaroons?”

“I do,” the designer said as he reached for one as she offered them. “What do you think about the dress?” he added with a frustrated huff as he pushed the sketchbook towards her before he reached for another macaroon. “It lacks something, but I can’t — pinpoint it. My … friend has an affinity for flowers and … bees. It’s supposed to be a one of a kind dress,” he finished slowly, massaging his temples, while Adrien exchanged a quick but meaningful gaze with Marinette. His father could not have been clearer in saying that the dress was meant for the former holder of the Bee Miraculous if he had written it in bright red letters all over the page.

Marinette’s hands shook as she took the sketchbook and Adrien rested his hand on her shoulder, drawing ladybugs with his thumb. “I — you … um, did you consider to add … a, uh, honeycomb pattern?” she suggested carefully.

“That’s a good idea,” the designer muttered as he took the sketchbook back, his forehead in careful wrinkles. “She’d like that.”

“It’s a nice dress,” she replied as she brushed back a strand of her hair, her gaze flickering over to the rejected designs that piled up on the nightstand. “Very pretty.”

“I haven’t designed a wedding dress in three years so this is … fun,” he muttered before he reached for a new pencil to add the suggested pattern to the sash. 

They fell in a comfortable mixture out of small talk and silence in which only the sound of the pencil on paper could be heard. It was not quite as pleasant as a similar situation had been at her parents’ living room, but as far as interactions between Adrien and his father in the past six years went, this was off the charts. In fact, the holder of the Cat Miraculous could hardly believe that it was going this well. Twice, he pinched himself to see if this was all some dream but nothing happened — aside from the confused glance Marinette threw him before she followed his example, only to shrug and to giggle when nothing happened.

“Not to kick you out, but — I believe you have class soon?” his father asked half an hour with a sigh as he checked his watch, setting his sketchbook aside.

“And we need to talk to the teacher about the field trip before,” Marinette said as she got up, reaching for her bag. “If you want to stay longer, Adrien, I’ll tell the teacher…”

“Not necessary, I’m going with you,” he replied as he reached for his coat. “Um, see you, father?”

“It was nice for you to visit,” Gabriel said calmly and yet somewhat awkward, pushing the rejected designs into her hand before he mentioned towards the boxes from her parents’ bakery. “Give your parents my regards, please?”

“Of course,” she said as she carefully pocketed the sketches. “Get well soon.”

“I’ll try,” he shrugged as he leaned back against his pillow, removing his glasses to clean them. “I’ll call you about the new creative designer, Adrien, there’s a favour I need to ask from you,” he added absentmindedly.

“I’ll see if I can stop by later,” Adrien said and smiled when his father nodded slowly before he reached for Marinette’s hand as she headed for the door. They did not speak as they walked out of the hospital, but he could easily tell that she was thinking about the past few weeks as well, putting her words into the right order. He did not blame her, not when she had once stumbled over words like she had stumbled over her own feet — well, that had been before she had become student president.

“So I suppose we’re bringing the fight to Hawkmoth,” Marinette said, turning towards Adrien, just as the grey skies above Paris tore open and rare autumn sunlight broke through, casting the world into golden light.

He smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may ask ‘will there be more?’ and the answer is ‘there will be more’. But I felt like this was a good point to end this first installment.
> 
> also, i haven't typed this quick in ages but I wanted to finish this before class today


End file.
